The Regatta at Sainte-Adresse is an oil-on-canvas painting by the impressionist painter Claude Monet. It was painted in 1867 and is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This painting and The Beach in Sainte-Adresse (Art Institute of Chicago) were probably conceived as a pair. They are identical in size, and their viewing point differs by only a few yards.

Sainte-Adresse, the well-to-do suburb of Le Havre, was the home of Monet's father. Destitute, Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his father and aunt Sophie Lecadre at the cost of abandoning his companion, Camille Doncieux, and their newborn son, Jean. Monet attended the birth in Paris and returned to the coast a few days later.

The pair of paintings juxtaposes this sunny regatta watched at high tide by well dressed bourgeois, with an overcast scene at low tide, fishing boats hauled onto the beach peopled with sailors and workers. Since Monet never exhibited the paintings side by side, the contrast between them was probably not intended as a social manifesto but instead reflected differing conditions under which the same place could be painted.

On 25 June 1867, Monet reported that he was working on about twenty pictures:

The painting is signed at the lower left.

?Henri Hecht, Paris (1873; bought in January for Fr 500 from the artist); ?sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 5, 1884, no. 25, as "Sainte-Adresse"; [Durand-Ruel, Paris, about 1888–91, sold on August 20, 1891 to Widener]; P. A. B. Widener, Ashbourne, near Philadelphia (1891–1907; sold on February 27, 1907 to Durand-Ruel); [Durand-Ruel, New York, 1907]; William Church Osborn, New York (1907–d. 1951)

This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). The full text of the article is here →