Etretat Pebble Beach
— the door the cliff opens for the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“A pebble beach on the Alabaster Coast of Normandy, two hours northwest of Paris. The cliff above the waterline opens into an arch, the Porte d'Aval, with the seventy-metre Needle, l'Aiguille, standing apart in the surf beyond it. Monet came back to paint these chalk walls more than fifty times, mostly in autumn weather, mostly under a flat Channel sky. The pebbles are flint, smoothed by the sea and noisy underfoot. The light is rarely showy and more often the colour of weather coming in.
Etretat Pebble Beach, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Étretat sits on the Côte d'Albâtre, the alabaster coast of Normandy that runs roughly 130 km from Le Havre to Le Tréport along the English Channel. The commune is small, with fewer than 1,500 residents, and the beach is a curved bay of flint pebbles bracketed by two chalk cliffs. To the south, the Falaise d'Aval rises to about 80 metres and carries the most photographed arch in France. To the north, the Falaise d'Amont holds the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, rebuilt after the Second World War and lit at night. Paris is about 200 km southeast by road; Le Havre, the nearest large city, sits half an hour to the south.
The cliffs at Étretat are Cretaceous chalk, roughly 90 million years old, laid down when this part of France lay beneath a shallow sea. Wave action and groundwater have carved three natural arches along this stretch of coast: the Porte d'Amont to the north, the Porte d'Aval in the centre, and the Manneporte a short walk further south. Standing free in the water beyond the Porte d'Aval is L'Aiguille, the Needle, a chalk pinnacle about 70 metres tall that Maurice Leblanc made famous as the hiding place of Arsène Lupin in L'Aiguille creuse in 1909. The chalk is soft; the coastline is retreating measurably each century, and the arches will not last indefinitely.
Claude Monet painted at Étretat across several visits between 1883 and 1886, producing more than fifty canvases of the cliffs and the arches under different weather. Eugène Boudin worked this coast earlier; Gustave Courbet's La Falaise d'Étretat après l'orage of 1870 hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. The light that drew them is the light of the English Channel: diffuse, often overcast, more grey than gold, with brief windows of horizontal sun at the ends of the day. Sunset behind the Porte d'Aval is the most-photographed moment of the year. In summer the cliff-top walk along the GR21 above the chapel gives the best view, especially in the half-hour before the sun is gone.