The Beach at Pourville

The Beach at Pourville (La Plage de Pourville) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet from 1882, held by the National Museum in Poznań, Poland; it is the only painting by Monet in a Polish public collection.

Early in 1882 Monet, who had recently moved to Poissy and disliked it, went to the Normandy coast near Dieppe looking for motifs. He needed to produce work in quantity for his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose business had been hit by the crash of the Union Générale bank. He settled at the small resort of Pourville and painted a number of seascapes, then returned with his family that summer; the two stays yielded around a hundred pictures.

The 60 by 73 cm canvas looks east from the cliff at Varengeville. Beyond the curve of Pourville beach rise the Amont cliff and the bay of Dieppe, with the fishing village at the right. Monet painted it outdoors on the clifftop, and conservators later found grains of sand in the paint layers. It belongs to a group of Pourville subjects that also includes Fishing Nets at Pourville and The Cliff Walk at Pourville.

After passing through Durand-Ruel's hands, the picture was shown in an exhibition of the dealer Paul Cassirer in Berlin and was bought in 1906 by a German art society, which deposited it in Poznań's Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the predecessor of today's National Museum. Removed to Saxony during the Second World War, it was taken to the Soviet Union and returned to Poznań in 1956. In September 2000 a man posing as a student copyist cut it from its frame and left a copy in its place. The canvas was recovered on 12 January 2010 behind a wardrobe in his parents' flat; he was sentenced that July to three years in prison. Restoration was finished in October 2010, but the cut through Monet's signature at lower right remains visible.