Les barques. Régates à Argenteuil

Les barques. Régates à Argenteuil (Boats: Regatta at Argenteuil) is a painting by Claude Monet of a sailing race on the Seine at Argenteuil, the boating town northwest of Paris where he lived from 1871 to 1878. Dated 1874 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 339, it entered the French national collections in 1911 with the bequest of Count Isaac de Camondo and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

What you're looking at

A file of racing yachts stretches across the wide canvas from left to right, their tall triangular sails seen side-on as they run with the wind. The largest boat, just left of center, rises almost to the top of the picture, its mainsail and jib in creamy white and pale gray, its hull a dark green-blue sliding low on the water. Behind and to the right, half a dozen more sails recede in a staggered line, each one smaller and paler, until the last is a faint white shape at the right edge.

On the left bank stand red-roofed houses, a tall poplar and a strip of green, with two more sails beached or moored at the water's edge. In the left foreground a small rowing boat carries two figures, a touch of red and white on the pale water. The river fills the lower half of the canvas, painted in rows of short, broken horizontal strokes of cream, gray, lilac and pale blue that turn the surface into a field of glinting ripples. The sky is a scumbled mass of white and gray cloud with patches of blue, matching the water in tone. The signature, Monet, is at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Argenteuil's broad basin of the Seine was one of the leading sailing centers near Paris, and regattas there drew crowds from the capital. Monet painted the boats again and again during his years in the town, sometimes from the riverbank and sometimes from his floating studio, a small boat fitted with a cabin. 1874 was a key year: in the spring he showed with the group that would be called the Impressionists, and that summer Manet and Renoir came to Argenteuil to paint alongside him. See Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

The canvas is large for an outdoor picture, 60 by 100 centimeters, and broadly handled. The sails are laid in with a few long, loaded strokes, the edges left soft so that they seem to flutter. The water is the most worked area, built from hundreds of short, separate touches. Monet keeps the palette light and close in value: the sails, sky and water are all variations of the same pale gray-white, so the picture reads as an impression of bright, overcast air rather than of strong sun.

How this version differs

Orsay has another Regatta at Argenteuil, the small, brilliantly colored picture of about 1872 from the Caillebotte bequest, Regatta at Argenteuil, with its dazzling blue water and broken reflections of red houses. The Camondo canvas is quieter and grayer, with the boats moving in procession rather than clustered at their moorings, and it gives much more space to the sky. Compare also The Basin at Argenteuil, a promenade scene of 1872, and Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat of 1874, in which a single sail stands for the whole fleet.

Ownership and where to see it

The French state's records list Ernest May, the banker and collector, as an owner in 1893, followed by the Durand-Ruel gallery the same year, then Count Isaac de Camondo, who left it to the Louvre in 1911 (inventory RF 2008). It was transferred to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. For other paintings by Monet in the museum, see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay.