Morning on the Seine, Giverny

Morning on the Seine, Giverny (Matinée sur la Seine) is a painting by Claude Monet from his series of dawn views of a quiet arm of the Seine near Giverny, signed and dated Claude Monet 97 at the lower left. It measures about 82 by 93.5 centimeters and is in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts (AC 1966.48).

What you're looking at

At first the canvas looks almost empty: a field of soft lilac, lavender and pearl gray from edge to edge. Then the forms surface. On the left, a mass of trees rises the full height of the picture, a little darker than the rest, in blue-gray and turquoise with touches of green and rose. Its leaves near the top are just distinguishable as feathery strokes. In the center and right, the far bank appears as pale violet shapes, barely darker than the sky, with one rounded clump of trees on the right shown only by a faint rosy outline.

A horizontal line just below the middle, a few strokes of whiter lilac, marks where the mist meets the water. Below it, the trees reappear as reflections, as faint as the trees themselves. A slightly darker vertical patch at the lower center is the reflection of the left bank; a paler zone to the right is the reflected sky. There is no color contrast to speak of and almost no value contrast. The signature at the lower left, in blue-violet, is one of the few distinct marks on the canvas.

This is the river in dense mist, before the sun has had any effect at all. The subject is not the trees or the water but the fog that hides them.

Giverny, 1897

Monet painted the Mornings on the Seine in 1896 and 1897, rising before dawn and rowing out to his studio boat on a backwater where the Epte meets the Seine. He kept a group of canvases going at once, each for a particular stage of the light. In the mistiest canvases, like this one and the Art Institute of Chicago's Branch of the Seine near Giverny (Mist), he pushed closer to pure atmosphere than he had in any earlier series, closer even than the foggiest Rouen Cathedral façades.

How it was painted

The paint is thin and smoothly brushed, with soft, blended strokes and no impasto. Monet keeps every color close in value and slightly grayed, so that the surface reads as a single veil. The few darker touches, in the trees at left, are placed with care to give just enough structure. Critics of the time compared such canvases to music, and Monet's friend Gustave Geffroy wrote about the series in that dreamlike vein.

How this version differs

Among the Mornings, this is one of the most extreme in its mist. Boston's Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897) shows the same composition in blue and mauve with the trees clearly silhouetted; the Hiroshima Morning on the Seine shows it in dark indigo against a pink sky; Morning on the Seine, Good Weather in sunlight. Here, almost everything has dissolved. See the whole series in Mornings on the Seine and the village in Monet's Giverny.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, a teaching museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. A Museum of Fine Arts, Houston exhibition credited the Mead's 1897 Morning on the Seine as a bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, the New York collector who died in 1966. Displays at college museums change often, so check before visiting. For other Monet canvases in New England, see Monet at the MFA Boston and where to see Monet's paintings.