During this period, the sleepy fishing village of Étretat became a fashionable tourist resort, not unlike the beachside towns Claude Monet famously celebrated in his scenes of modern life of the 1860s and 1870s. By the 1880s, however, his focus had irrevocably shifted, as revealed in the ...
Because of the vignette in the foreground, in which a sea creature devours a man, this painting was previously identified as a depiction of Jonah and the whale from Rashid al-Din's fourteenth-century text Jami al-Tawarikh (Universal History). However, even in period versions of the theme t...