Fishing Boats at Honfleur

Fishing Boats at Honfleur is an early harbor scene by Claude Monet, catalogued by Wildenstein as number 116 and dated around 1868. The tall canvas, about 100 by 80 centimeters, is in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the collection formed by the Armenian oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian.

What you are looking at

Two wooden fishing boats lie side by side in the harbor basin, their dark hulls nearly touching, with names lettered in white along their sterns. Their masts climb out of the top of the canvas, rigged with furled and half-lowered sails of gray, brown and dirty white that hang in heavy folds, and a long boom slants across the right-hand boat. A small red pennant flies at the top of the left mast.

To the left a stone quay and a row of tall old harbor houses recede into the distance, their facades pale against a gray-lilac sky. To the right more masts and the far side of the basin fade into haze. The lower third of the picture is water, and here Monet does something striking. The boats' reflections fall straight down in long, dark, wavering shapes, almost black, broken by ripples of gray and white light. They are as large and as carefully worked as the boats themselves, so the picture reads as two images, one upright and one upside down. The signature is at lower right. Nobody is on board; the boats rest between tides, and the picture has the stillness of an empty harbor early in the day.

How it was painted

The palette is restrained, built on blacks, browns and grays, much closer to Édouard Manet than to the bright Impressionism of the following decade. Monet uses black freely here, something he would later avoid. The handling is broad and assured: the sails and hulls laid in as flat masses, the rigging drawn with a few quick dark lines, the sky scrubbed in with lilac and gray. The vertical format, unusual for a harbor scene, emphasizes the height of the masts and the depth of their reflections.

Look at the water. Monet paints the reflections with long vertical strokes and then cuts across them with short horizontal flicks of light paint, the same device he would refine at La Grenouillère in 1869 and at Argenteuil in the 1870s. It is one of the earliest places in his work where the surface of water becomes the real subject of a picture.

Honfleur and the young Monet

Honfleur, across the Seine estuary from Le Havre, was Monet's home ground as a young painter. He worked there with Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind in the mid-1860s, painting its quays, streets and the countryside around the Saint-Siméon farm. His snow scene A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur, the street view Rue de la Bavolle, Honfleur and The Beach at Honfleur belong to the same years. Around 1868–69 he made a group of boat pictures in this dark key, among them The Boats in Bremen.

A few years later he would paint a far brighter harbor, at Le Havre, in Impression, Sunrise, where the boats are dark silhouettes against an orange sun. Seen together, the two pictures show how much changed in Monet's handling of light and color in four years. Here the boats are solid, heavy objects with names and rigging; there they have become marks on a surface of colored light. Both, though, are about the same thing: boats, water and the reflections that join them. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast covers Honfleur, Le Havre and Sainte-Adresse.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, alongside other works by Monet in its French collection. Gulbenkian, who lived in Paris for much of his life, bought French nineteenth-century painting in depth, and his collection opened to the public in Lisbon in 1969. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.