Farmyard in Normandy

Farmyard in Normandy (Cour de ferme en Normandie) is one of Claude Monet's earliest surviving paintings, made around 1863, when he was in his early twenties. The canvas, 65 by 80 centimeters and number 16 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is signed "C. Monet" at lower right and belongs to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

What you are looking at

A Normandy farmyard opens in front of us on a bright, hazy afternoon. At the left stand two farm buildings: a low cottage with whitewashed walls crossed by dark timber framing, and behind it a big barn with plank-sided walls and a steep roof. In the center a pond reflects the barn and the sky in a long, dark mirror, with a few white ducks swimming on it. A brown-and-white cow stands in the lower left, head down, and in the lower right a man stands at the water's edge with a small child beside him, while ducks and chickens wander on the grass at their feet.

The right half is given to an orchard of old apple trees, their gnarled trunks leaning and their crowns spreading in a dark green canopy that arches over the picture. In the shade beneath, a second cow grazes. The sky is pale and milky, with soft streaks of cloud. Everything is still and ordinary: no story, only a working farm on a summer day.

How it was painted

This is Monet before Impressionism. The handling is solid and carefully modeled, with smooth gradations of tone and dark, warm shadows, close to the Barbizon painters he admired, such as Charles-François Daubigny and Camille Corot, and to the Dutch landscapes of the seventeenth century, where animals and buildings are arranged like this around a pool. The trees are painted as dense masses of dark green with only their edges broken against the sky.

Yet some passages hint at what was coming. The reflections in the pond are laid in with broken horizontal strokes, the light on the barn wall is warm and direct, and the whitewashed cottage is built from blocks of cream and pale gray with almost no drawing. The figures and animals are small and sketchy, placed to give scale rather than to tell a story, which is how Monet would use figures for the rest of his life.

The composition is carefully built. The barn roof, the line of the pond and the arch of the apple boughs all lead toward the center, where the reflection of the barn sits in the dark water. The two cows mark the near and far edges of the yard, and the man and child stand at the point where the eye comes to rest. It is a traditional arrangement, learned from older pictures, and Monet would soon abandon it for the open, uncentered compositions of his maturity.

Early years in Normandy

Monet grew up in Le Havre and learned to paint out of doors from Eugène Boudin, who persuaded the teenage caricaturist to take landscape seriously, and later from the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind. In the early 1860s, between periods of study in Paris at the studio of Charles Gleyre, he worked around Honfleur and the countryside of the Seine estuary, where artists gathered at the Saint-Siméon farm inn. His very first exhibited picture, View at Rouelles, Le Havre of 1858, is in the same spirit as this farmyard.

Later views of that same countryside, such as Road by Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter and A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur, and the Honfleur street of Rue de la Bavolle, show how quickly his style loosened over the next few years. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast follows his work in the region where he grew up.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay, where it gives a useful starting point for Monet's development before pictures such as Women in the Garden and the Déjeuner sur l'herbe fragments. For the full arc of his career, see Monet's life in paintings. More on Claude Monet.