Matinée sur la Seine

Matinée sur la Seine (Morning on the Seine) is a painting by Claude Monet from his series of dawn views of a backwater of the Seine near Giverny, signed and dated Claude Monet 97 at the lower left and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1484. The near-square canvas measures about 89 by 92 centimeters. It is in a private collection; published provenance places it with the Blossom family of Cleveland from 1955, then with Acquavella Galleries in New York from 1986, before a sale at Christie's, New York, in November 2017.

What you're looking at

The composition is the series' standard one: a tall bank of trees on the left leaning over the water, a smaller group on the right, and between them a channel of light running back to a low horizon just below the middle of the canvas. What sets this version apart is the stage of the morning. The sun has come up.

The trees on the left are still in shadow, painted in deep blue, slate and violet, with a few pale, almost white flickers in the leaves near the top. On the right, though, the far trees are lit: their crowns turn pale green, yellow-green and lilac, the first real greens to appear in the sequence, and a soft glow sits behind them. The sky between the banks is pale cream and pink, quite bright. On the water, a few horizontal strokes of white mark the remains of the mist along the far bank.

Below the horizon the reflections repeat everything: dark blue-violet columns under the left bank, a pale, pinkish path of reflected sky in the center, and the sunlit green trees at right repeated as soft green and lilac patches that ripple slightly. The signature, in dark blue, sits at lower left.

Giverny, 1897

Monet painted the Mornings on the Seine in the summers of 1896 and 1897, from a studio boat moored where the Epte meets the Seine near his house. He began before dawn and worked on a set of canvases at once, each reserved for a particular moment. Christie's has described the series as comprising some twenty-one canvases.

How it was painted

The paint is fluid and soft, with blended strokes in the foliage and thin, smooth layers in the sky and water. The contrast between the shadowed left bank and the sunlit right bank is the picture's main event, and Monet sets it up with color temperature: cool blues and violets on one side, warm greens, yellows and pinks on the other.

How this version differs

This canvas belongs to the later part of the morning. Compared with the blue-mauve Morning on the Seine, near Giverny in Boston or the misty Morning on the Seine, Giverny at Amherst, the mist here has mostly lifted and the greens have returned. It is close to the Orsay's Arm of the Seine near Giverny, though bluer on the left bank, and cooler than the orange sunrise of Morning on the Seine, Good Weather. See the whole series in Mornings on the Seine and the village in Monet's Giverny.

Where to see it

The painting is privately owned and not on public view. For canvases from the series in public collections, including the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, see where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.