Claude Monet painted the same stretch of cliff more than ninety times.

The place is Étretat, a small fishing village on the coast of Normandy, where the chalk cliffs fall into the sea in great arches and a single spire of rock, the Aiguille, stands alone in the water.

Monet had known the place since childhood. He grew up in Normandy, and these cliffs were among the first landscapes he ever saw...

He returned to paint them again and again. He worked through the 1880s in front of the same rock formations, and across that time he produced more than ninety canvases of them: the cliffs at dawn, at sunset, under storm, under calm, in winter light and in the gold of a clear evening.

In his letters to Alice, the woman he would later marry, he described the agony of it: the weather turning, the tide rising, the sun moving, the colour he had begun to capture vanishing before he could finish.

He often worked on several canvases at once, switching between them as the conditions changed, racing each one against the hour.

In a letter to his friend Frédéric Bazille he wrote: "It is beautiful here in Etretat. Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all, my head is bursting. I want to fight, scratch it off, start again, because I start to see and understand. It seems to me as if I can see nature and I can catch it all."

The cliffs of Étretat had stood for millions of years and would look, to most people, the same on any given day. Monet saw that they were never the same even for two minutes. He stood on that shore and tried to hold, on canvas, something that exists only for an instant and then is gone forever.

And that's exactly what those paintings really are: 90 attempts to keep a single, vanishing moment of light from disappearing. As Dylan Thomas once wrote:

"Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

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