Regatta at Sainte-Adresse

Regatta at Sainte-Adresse is an oil on canvas painted by Claude Monet in the summer of 1867 on the coast near Le Havre; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Sainte-Adresse, a well-to-do suburb of Le Havre, was the home of Monet's father. Without money, Monet spent the summer of 1867 there with his father and his aunt Sophie Lecadre, at the cost of leaving behind his companion Camille Doncieux and their newborn son Jean in Paris; he attended the birth and returned to the coast a few days later. On 25 June he reported that he was working on about twenty pictures, among them seascapes of the Le Havre regattas with many figures on the beach and the outer harbour covered with small sails.

The canvas was probably conceived as one of a pair with The Beach at Sainte-Adresse in the Art Institute of Chicago: the two are the same size and were painted from viewpoints only a few yards apart. Here a regatta under bright sun is watched at high tide by fashionably dressed spectators on the shingle, while the companion shows fishing boats hauled up at low tide under an overcast sky, with sailors and workers on the beach. Because Monet never exhibited the two side by side, the contrast was probably not meant as a social statement but reflects different conditions in which the same spot could be painted. The picture is signed at lower left.

It may be the 'Les régates du Havre' shown in Bordeaux in 1868. Its securely documented provenance begins with the dealer Durand-Ruel, who sold it in 1891 to P. A. B. Widener near Philadelphia; it later belonged to William Church Osborn of New York, who bequeathed it to the Met in 1951. The canvas measures 75.2 by 101.6 cm.