View of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme

View of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme is an oil on canvas painting created by Edgar Degas between 1896 and 1898. Dating from the artist's late period, this work departs slightly from his characteristic concentration on interior scenes and figure studies, instead offering an atmospheric observation of a specific French townscape. The piece depicts the seaside community of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme in the Hauts-de-France region, a location Degas often visited during summer excursions in the 1890s.

The technique employed here showcases the evolution of Degas’s style toward the close of the century. Unlike his earlier, tightly composed realist works, this canvas features broader, more vigorous brushstrokes and a heightened emphasis on saturated color fields and texture, reflecting the broader Post-Impressionist trends of the era. The composition captures the intersection of the natural landscape and the manmade urban environment, showing the low-lying architecture of the town clustered against the expansive, often turbulent skies and the estuary waters. This focus on pure landscape demonstrates Degas’s ongoing engagement with light and atmosphere, echoing contemporary artistic developments while retaining his singular structural rigor.

The painting View of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme remains one of the most important of Degas's topographical works, providing valuable insight into the range of subjects the artist addressed outside of his ballet and bathing themes. This work currently resides in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is frequently studied by scholars examining the late 19th-century French landscape tradition. As a key example of the artist’s later period, high-quality prints of the work are often sought after, benefiting from public domain availability in certain contexts depending on copyright status and institutional licensing.