Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1896)

Morning on the Seine, near Giverny is one of the first canvases in Claude Monet's series of dawn views of the Seine, signed and dated Claude Monet 96 at the lower left. It shows a backwater of the river near his home at Giverny, the trees on the bank mirrored in still water as the mist lifts. The painting, 73.7 by 93 centimeters, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, part of the Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, which came to the museum with the bequest of Grace M. Edwards in 1939.

What you're looking at

The picture is split in two. The left half is a dense bank of trees, a large willow leaning out over the water at the top, its foliage in sage, olive and blue-green, flecked with pale lilac and pink where the morning light touches the leaves. Below it, bright yellow-green bushes run down to the water's edge. Their mass is solid and close to us.

The right half is almost empty. A soft pink-lilac sky fills the upper right, and in the distance, a row of trees on the far bank shows only as blue-violet shapes, blurred by mist. The water is still, a sheet of pale pink and lavender, with a faint white line marking the far edge of the channel. In the lower right, the pink sky is reflected in the water as a pale glow; in the lower center, the reflections of the trees are soft blue and violet, dissolving into the haze.

Signed in reddish brown at the lower left, the canvas is wider than many in the series, which tend toward the square. That extra width lets Monet set the heavy green bank against a broad space of light.

Giverny, summer 1896

Monet began the Mornings on the Seine in the summer of 1896, on a stretch of the Seine near the mouth of the Epte, a short distance from his house. He rose before dawn, went down to the river and painted from his studio boat, working on several canvases at once as the light changed. He took the series up again more intensively in 1897; most of the canvases are dated that year. This canvas is one of the relatively few dated 1896.

Boston's painting has an early American history. According to the museum, Monet sold it to the dealer Durand-Ruel in 1898; it later passed through the collection of Bertha Palmer of Chicago before Grace M. Edwards of Boston acquired it in 1907.

How it was painted

The handling is soft but more varied than in the most misty canvases of 1897. The foliage on the left is built up in short, feathery strokes of several greens with touches of pink; the sky is laid in with thin, smoothly brushed color; the water in long horizontal strokes, blended at the edges. The pink in the sky and water is the warmest note and gives the time of day: the first light after sunrise, with mist still hanging over the far bank.

How this version differs

Many of the 1897 canvases, like the Met's Morning on the Seine near Giverny, place a heavy mass of trees on both sides and a narrow channel of light in the middle. Here the right bank is almost absent, so the picture is more open and asymmetrical. Compared with Boston's other canvas from the series, Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897), it is greener and pinker, with more daylight in it. The Orsay's Arm of the Seine near Giverny shows the same moment later in the morning. 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 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which owns one of the largest groups of Monet paintings in the world, including two canvases from this series. See Monet at the MFA Boston.