Sur le motif

Just a few meters from the spot where Claude Monet painted Impression, soleil levant from his hotel room on November 13, 1872, at 7:35 a.m., Sur le motif offers a sensory experience of the Le Havre landscape. The installation operates on the principle of a periscope: a circular mirror is positioned at a height of 7.14 meters, corresponding to the painter’s eye level from the second-floor balcony of the Hôtel de l’Amirauté, which was destroyed during the bombings. Sur le motif invites visitors to adopt Monet’s original point of view. By looking up, they discover the reflection of today’s harbor landscape.

The device encourages everyone to compare the real view of present-day Le Havre with the intimate memory of the painting they carry in mind: a dialogue between the present moment and the founding moment of Impressionism. At the base of the work, an engraved plaque sets appointments for the next hundred years: it marks the seven moments when, on November 13 at the same time, the ebb tide will have the same coefficient as on the morning Monet painted his picture. Like a machine for traveling backward or forward in time, On the Motif thus offers multiple opportunities for Le Havre to rediscover lighting and atmospheric conditions similar to the famous original mist.

Sur le motif was conceived in dialogue with Géraldine Lefebvre, director of the MuMa, as part of the exhibition Monet au Havre, celebrating the centenary of the artist’s death.