Bords de la Seine à Argenteuil

What you are looking at

A wide, still river runs straight away from us between two wooded banks. On the left a mass of yellow-green trees comes down to the water; on the right a darker, bluer clump stands on a spit of land. Between them, far off, are a row of slender trees and a low line of hills. The sky is a pale, even grey-blue, and it is repeated almost unchanged in the water, where the trees on both banks are mirrored in soft, horizontal strokes. A signature reading "Claude Monet" is painted at lower right.

There are no boats, figures or buildings. The picture is about the reflection and the symmetry it creates: the horizon sits a little above the middle, and the canvas could almost be folded along it.

Why the attribution is disputed

This painting is best known not as a Monet but as a test case. The title and the date 1875 are inscribed on its frame. Its recorded history begins in 1918, when the Paris dealer Georges Petit sold it to a collection in Cairo, where it remained until 1953. The British art historian David Joel bought it in 1992 for £40,000 and spent years trying to have it accepted as an authentic Monet. It was lent as a Monet to a touring retrospective in Japan in 1994.

The standard authority on Monet's work is the catalogue raisonné compiled by Daniel Wildenstein and maintained by the Wildenstein Institute in Paris. The Institute examined the picture and declined to include it. In 2011 the painting was the subject of the first episode of the BBC series Fake or Fortune?, in which Fiona Bruce and the dealer Philip Mould commissioned scans, pigment analysis and studies of the brushwork and signature. Some experts they consulted supported the attribution; the Institute did not change its view, and other specialists in Impressionism also rejected the painting. Joel took the Institute to court in France in 2014 and lost; in December 2015 the courts finally declined to intervene. He died in 2019.

For a reader, the honest position is simple: the painting is not in the catalogue raisonné and is not accepted as Monet's by the principal authority on his work. This page describes it so that people who meet it on television or online know what it is.

How it compares with Monet's Argenteuil pictures

Monet lived at Argenteuil, a small town on the Seine just northwest of Paris, from the end of 1871 to 1878, and painted the river there dozens of times; see Monet at Argenteuil. The accepted pictures of quiet water at Argenteuil, such as The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil in the National Gallery, London, or The Seine at Argenteuil, share this one's subject: banks of trees, a calm river and reflections. They are also full of specific incident, a towpath, a villa, a fisherman, a sail, a factory chimney. Riverside Path at Argenteuil is a good example of the way Monet's brush describes figures and boats with a few dark, exact touches.

Whatever its authorship, the painting is a competent, quiet piece of river landscape in the Impressionist manner, and it shows how thin the line between a Monet and a picture "in the style of" can be when documents are missing.

Where is it now?

The painting is in a private collection and is not on public view. To see accepted Monets of Argenteuil, go to the National Gallery in London, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris or the National Gallery of Art in Washington; see where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.