Houses at Argenteuil

Houses at Argenteuil is a painting by Claude Monet of village houses and a church spire seen across a flowering field, made in 1873 at Argenteuil, the Seine-side town northwest of Paris where he lived from the end of 1871. The canvas measures 54 by 73 centimeters, is signed at lower right and is number 277 in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue. It belongs to the Nationalgalerie of the Berlin State Museums (A I 637), which acquired it in 1898, and is shown in the Alte Nationalgalerie. Some online listings date it to 1891, but it is from Monet's Argenteuil years.

What does Houses at Argenteuil show?

The bottom third of the canvas is a field in full bloom, a dense carpet of yellow flowers laid in short, crisscrossing strokes of lemon, ochre and green. Red poppies are scattered through it as tiny dabs, thickest at the lower left and center, thinning toward the back.

Behind the field, four modest houses stand in a row among trees and young saplings. At the far left, one is cut off by the frame. Next comes a pale gray house with a red-tiled gable, then a gabled house at center with a single dark doorway, and at the right a tall white house with a hipped red roof, chimneys and dark windows. Between the center house and the trees rises a slender black spire, most likely the church of Argenteuil.

The sky takes up nearly half the picture and carries the drama. At upper left, patches of blue and bright white cumulus remain, while heavy gray-blue storm clouds roll in from the right, darkening the whole upper right corner. The light on the field and the house walls is the clear, slightly eerie brightness that comes just before rain.

Details most viewers miss

At the right edge, beside the white house, two small figures bend over the ground, gardeners or field workers painted in a few strokes of blue and brown. They are easy to overlook, but they give the field its scale and remind us that this is working land on the edge of town, not a park.

Look too at the saplings in front of the white house. Monet paints their trunks as thin, wavering verticals with feathery green leaves, so they break up the solid facade and let the eye pass through to the wall behind.

How it was painted

This is an open-air picture, quickly and confidently made. The field is built of hundreds of separate marks rather than smooth color; the houses are simplified to blocks of white and gray with single red shapes for roofs. The clouds are worked with broader, swirling strokes and thicker white, and in places the cloud edges are dragged over the blue beneath.

The whole picture runs on contrast: warm yellow and red below, cool blue and gray above, with the pale houses as the hinge between them. That balance of a sunlit foreground under a threatening sky is unusual in Monet's sunny Argenteuil summers.

Monet's Argenteuil years

Monet rented a house at Argenteuil from December 1871 until early 1878. The town was growing fast, with factories, a railway bridge and a busy boating basin, but its edges were still farmland and orchards. He painted all of it: regattas, bridges, his own garden and fields like this one. In 1873 he made several flower-field pictures, most famously Poppy Field, with Camille and Jean walking through the red flowers, and the garden views The Artist's House at Argenteuil and Lilac in the Sun.

The following spring he showed with the group soon called the Impressionists at their first exhibition in Paris. Our Monet at Argenteuil hub gathers the town's pictures in one place.

Where to see Houses at Argenteuil

The painting is in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Berlin's Museum Island. The Nationalgalerie was among the first public museums to buy Impressionist pictures, and this canvas entered it in 1898, during the directorship of Hugo von Tschudi. The museum also owns Monet's Summer (Meadow at Bezons) of 1874, another sunny field near the Seine. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for his life and work, Claude Monet.