The Seine at Asnières (Hermitage)

Claude Monet painted The Seine at Asnières in 1873, a few months after Impression, Sunrise. It shows flat-roofed barges moored on the Seine at Asnières, a fast-growing suburb just northwest of Paris, with a line of new villas and bare poplars across the water. The canvas, about 46 by 56 centimeters, is in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, which has shown it publicly since 1995. A second, larger view of the same stretch is in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.

What you're looking at

The foreground is crowded with working boats. A long, low barge runs across the picture with a covered cabin, its roof a gray-blue slab. Two blunt, box-like hulls with white upper edges jut toward us at the center, and a third, dark brown, sits at the right, its side reflected in the water below. These look like the floating wash-houses and storage barges common on the Seine at the time. A thin mast rises at the left edge, and the bow of a dark rowing boat noses in at lower left beside a strip of muddy bank.

Across the river the light is strong and dry. The far bank is a row of small houses in cream, ocher, pink and brick red, with blue-slate and orange roofs, punctuated by tall poplars still bare or just coming into leaf. A few tiny figures walk on the quay. Their reflections break up in the water into dabs of white, pink and yellow. The sky is pale lavender-blue, lightly brushed. Monet signed in dark paint at lower right.

Asnières in 1873

In the 1870s Asnières was changing quickly. The railway from the Gare Saint-Lazare had made it a short ride from Paris, and small industries, boatyards and new houses in brick and millstone grit were filling the riverbanks, built by workers and the lower middle class. The far bank in Monet's picture shows those new villas with their small gardens.

Monet was then living a few kilometers downstream at Argenteuil and came to Asnières to paint with friends. The modern suburban Seine, with its mix of leisure boats and working barges, was one of his central subjects in these years; see Monet at Argenteuil. The Cologne canvas, The Seine at Asnières, shows a similar view. Compare also Argenteuil and The Basin at Argenteuil, where the river is given over to sailing and promenades.

How it was painted

The picture is small and quickly painted. Monet builds the barges in broad, flat planes of color and outlines their edges with a few dark strokes. The cabin roof and the white rims are laid on thickly with a loaded brush. Across the river he switches to a smaller touch, setting down each house as a block of light color with a darker roof. In the water he uses short horizontal strokes that pick up the colors of the far bank, so the reflections read as broken light rather than mirror images. The palette is lighter and warmer than in Impression, Sunrise, with sun on the far bank and cooler violets in the shadows of the hulls.

The choice of subject matters too. Working barges, not pleasure boats, take up most of the foreground. Monet painted the industrial side of the Seine more often than his later reputation suggests, and this canvas is a modest example of that interest.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged to Eduard Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer, a wealthy Hamburg businessman, and after his death to his widow, Alice Meyer. At the end of the Second World War it was removed to the Soviet Union and kept as war reparations, unknown to the public. It was first shown at the Hermitage in 1995, in an exhibition of French paintings from German private collections. It now belongs to the museum's group of Monet paintings in the General Staff Building. For other locations, see where to see Monet's paintings.