Monet settled in the village between February and mid-April, during which time he wrote to his future wife, Alice Hoschedé, "How beautiful the countryside is becoming, and what joy it would be for me to show you all its delightful nooks and crannies!"

A sense of movement suggested by painterly calligraphy was a property of Monet's work in the 1880s, and is here used to connote the effect of a summer wind upon figures, land, water, and clouds moving across the sky.

[3] During the painting process, Monet reduced the size of a rocky promontory at far right, to better balance the composition's proportions;[4] however, it's also been noted that this secondary cliff was a late addition to the canvas, and was not part of the original design.

[6] Describing similar works by the artist, art historian John House wrote, “His cliff tops rarely show a single sweep of terrain.

Instead there are breaks in space; the eye progresses into depth by a succession of jumps; distance is expressed by planes overlapping each other and by atmospheric rather than linear perspective- by softening the focus and changes of color.”[7] The sense of immediacy is heightened by the juxtapositions of the cliff and sea, the contrast between ground and openness.