Morning on the Seine near Giverny

Morning on the Seine near Giverny is a painting by Claude Monet from his series of dawn views of a backwater of the Seine, signed and dated Claude Monet 97 at the lower left. It measures 81.6 by 93 centimeters and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which received it in 1956 with the bequest of Julia W. Emmons.

What you're looking at

The composition is the classic one of the series. On the left, a wall of trees fills more than half the canvas, leaning over the water, its foliage painted in violet, blue, teal and dusky green, with a few pale lilac highlights where the first light falls. On the right, a smaller group of trees, rounder and lighter, stands on the opposite bank in blue-violet with a touch of yellow-green. Between them, a narrow wedge of sky opens in the upper center, a pale cream and apricot glow.

That glow is repeated, upside down, in the water. Below the horizon, which runs across the canvas just below the middle, a channel of pale gold, pink and cream runs from the distance toward the lower right corner, between the dark reflections of the two banks. The reflected trees are a little softer and darker than the real ones, and in the water to the left Monet adds horizontal dashes of violet and blue that show the surface is water rather than glass. A couple of fine white lines mark the far edge of the channel and the mist lying on it.

Signed at the lower left in dark red, the picture is nearly square and almost symmetrical about its horizon. It is the moment just after sunrise: the mist is thinning, the sky is warm, and the trees are still in shadow.

Giverny, summer 1897

Monet had begun the series in 1896 and took it up again in the summer of 1897. The journalist Maurice Guillemot, who visited in August 1897, described Monet rising at half past three, rowing out to his studio boat and working on a dozen or more canvases in turn as the light changed, each assigned to a stage of the morning. This canvas belongs to that intense campaign. Monet showed a group of the Mornings at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1898.

How it was painted

The handling is soft and blended. Monet uses thin, smoothly brushed layers in the sky and water, and short, feathered strokes in the trees, so that their edges dissolve into the air. Colors are close in value; contrast comes from temperature, the cool violet trees against the warm gold light. The canvas texture shows through the thin passages of sky.

How this version differs

The Met's canvas is one of the warmest and most luminous of the series. Compared with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's blue-mauve Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897), which shows almost the same view in deeper mist, it has more color in the sky and a gold rather than pink-white reflection. It is more symmetrical than the green, open 1896 canvas in Boston, and less advanced in the morning than the Orsay's Arm of the Seine near Giverny. 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 Metropolitan Museum of Art, usually in the nineteenth-century European paintings galleries on the second floor, which hold one of the largest groups of Monet paintings anywhere. See Monet at the Met.