Marine, plage de Sainte-Adresse demonstrates the prodigious talent of 16-year-old Claude Monet. Displaying a striking sharpness of detail, balanced by a gestural evocation of light, this exquisite monochrome drawing anticipates the future preoccupations of the founding father of Impressionism. Monet would continue to use pastel, chalk and pencil as the springboard for his Impressionist oils, preferring works on paper for his en-plein-air compositions as they enabled him maximum agility for capturing the vicissitudes of light and atmosphere.