Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897)

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. The canvas measures 81.3 by 92.7 centimeters and is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a gift of Mrs. Walter Scott Fitz that entered the museum in 1911. Its French title is Bras de Seine près de Giverny.

What you're looking at

This is one of the bluest canvases of the series. The whole picture is painted in a narrow range of blue, turquoise, teal and mauve, with pinkish white for the light. On the left, a great mass of trees leans over the water, a cool blue-green, with a few whitish highlights in the leaves near the top. On the right, a smaller group of trees on the far bank is a softer blue silhouette. Between them, the sky is a pale, pinkish lilac, the only warm note in the upper half.

The horizon sits just below the center, marked by a few thin white strokes where the mist lies on the water. Below it, everything is mirrored: the dark blue reflections of the trees on either side, and between them a long, pale band of pink-lilac light running from the far channel down to the lower right. The left foreground is a deep, dim turquoise, the reflection of the trees overhead, with a few lighter flecks of green and violet. There are no sharp edges anywhere.

The effect is of the minutes before sunrise, when light has entered the sky but not yet the trees, and the mist has not begun to lift.

Giverny, summer 1897

Monet began this series in 1896 and painted most of it in the summer of 1897, from a studio boat moored on a quiet branch of the Seine near the mouth of the Epte, a short way from his house. A visitor that August, the journalist Maurice Guillemot, described him going out before dawn to a group of canvases, each kept for a particular state of the light. Most of the Mornings were exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1898, and several went quickly to American collectors.

How it was painted

The paint is applied in thin, smoothly brushed layers, many of them dragged or scumbled over a pale ground, so that the canvas texture shows through. The trees are made of soft, rounded touches, close in value to the sky around them. Monet avoids lines; even the horizon is only a slight change in tone. The color harmony is close to monochrome, an exercise in how many blues and mauves can be told apart.

How this version differs

The composition is nearly the same as in the Met's Morning on the Seine near Giverny, but the moment is earlier: the Met's sky is gold and apricot, Boston's is cold pink-lilac, and its trees are still blue rather than violet. Compared with Boston's other canvas from the series, Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1896), it is mistier, more symmetrical and less green. For a later, sunlit stage of the same view, see Morning on the Seine, Good Weather, and for the misty sunrise, the Marmottan's Rising Sun. 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 a second canvas from this series dated 1896. See Monet at the MFA Boston.