The Customs House at Varengeville (1897): Artwork and History

The Customs House at Varengeville (1897) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Claude Monet painted the customs house at Varengeville, on the Normandy coast of France, four times in 1882 and four more times in 1897. On each occasion he chose a similar vantage looking down on the small structure, which appears to grow out of the cliffside. The dimensions of this version are nearly identical to those of the other three canvases from the second visit. Here, Monet increased the amount of white in his paints to capture more nuanced atmospheric effects. He also experimented with techniques to animate the surface, at times scraping down or wiping away the still-soft paint to expose underlying colors. In the water, for example, breaks in the pale-gray paint reveal a bright green beneath, which the artist accentuated with additional touches of a similar green on top.

Object facts

• Title: The Customs House at Varengeville
• Date: 1897
• Artist attribution: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 65.6 × 92.8 cm (25 13/16 × 36 1/2 in.); Framed: 83.5 × 110.2 × 5.7 cm (32 7/8 × 43 3/8 × 2 1/4 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1933.1149

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.