Morning on the Seine

Morning on the Seine (Matinée sur la Seine) is a painting by Claude Monet from his series of dawn views of a quiet arm of the Seine near his home at Giverny, dated 1897. It belongs to the Hiroshima Museum of Art in Japan, which lists it as Matinée sur la Seine (Bras de la Seine près de Giverny). Wikidata records its size as 82 by 93.5 centimeters.

What you're looking at

This is one of the darkest canvases of the series, painted at the very beginning of the morning. The trees on both banks are deep indigo, navy and blue-violet, almost black in places, their shapes clear against the sky but with no detail inside them. On the left, a great mass of foliage fills the whole height of the canvas and leans out over the water; a few pale lilac and white touches near the top catch the earliest light. On the right, a rounded group of trees stands out as a dark blue silhouette.

Between them, the sky is a clear salmon pink fading to pale lilac at the top. It is the only warm color in the upper half and it makes the dark trees look darker still. Below the horizon, a band of pale lilac mist lies across the water. Beneath it, the pink sky is reflected as a long vertical path of rose and peach running down the right-center of the canvas, framed by the dark, wavering reflections of the trees. In the left foreground the water is dark blue-green, broken by short strokes of violet and pink. The signature, in dark paint, sits at the lower left.

The contrast between the inky trees and the rose sky gives this version a drama the mistier canvases of the series lack. It is dawn, not yet sunrise: the light is in the sky, not on the land.

Giverny, 1896–97

Monet began the Mornings on the Seine in 1896 and painted most of them in the summer of 1897, at a spot where the Epte joins the Seine, a short way from his house. He went out before dawn to his studio boat, where several canvases waited, and painted each in turn as the light changed. The sequence runs from the blue darkness before dawn, through mist and pink first light, to the full green of morning.

How it was painted

The trees are built in soft, blended strokes of blue and violet, layered so that their edges stay hazy. The sky is painted thinly and smoothly, the canvas texture showing through. The water mixes long horizontal strokes with vertical drags of color for the reflections. Monet keeps the palette to blues, violets and pinks, with no greens at all, which is unusual even for this series.

How this version differs

On the clock of the series, this canvas comes early. It is darker and more saturated than Boston's Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897), which shows the same moment in pale mauve mist, and it has none of the gold of the Met's Morning on the Seine near Giverny or the orange glow of Morning on the Seine, Good Weather. Its nearest companion in mood is the Marmottan's Rising Sun, though that canvas is softer and bluer. See the whole series in Mornings on the Seine and the village in Monet's Giverny.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Hiroshima Museum of Art, a private museum in Hiroshima's Central Park founded in 1978 by the Hiroshima Bank, which concentrates on French painting from Romanticism to the École de Paris. Japan has an exceptionally strong tradition of collecting Monet, and canvases from this series are also in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.