Quai du Louvre, Paris

What you are looking at

From a high window we look down and across the Quai du Louvre on a bright spring day. In the foreground the broad paved quay is busy with tiny figures: women in wide skirts, some under parasols, men in top hats, a child, horse-drawn cabs and carriages. A round advertising kiosk with a red dome stands near the center, and at right a hexagonal kiosk with a dark roof marks the edge of the pavement. Beyond a row of young trees in fresh yellow-green leaf runs the Seine, and across it the Left Bank and the Île de la Cité fill the middle distance. The big round crown of trees at the center is the garden at the tip of the island, and above the rooftops rises the pale dome of the Panthéon, near the center of the skyline. A wide, light sky with small white clouds takes up nearly half the picture.

The figures are made of a few touches each, a dash of black for a coat, a dot of pink for a face, a smear of white for a dress, and yet each holds its posture convincingly. Notice the advertising hoarding painted on the gable at far left, a red-framed panel high on a building, and the shadows that fall short and blue on the quay, placing the scene near midday. The trees are the most freely painted passages: soft, rounded masses of yellow-green with the light coming through.

Painting Paris from the Louvre

In the spring of 1867 Monet obtained permission to paint from the Louvre itself, and from a balcony on its east side he made three city views: The Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, now in Berlin; the Garden of the Princess, now at Oberlin College in Ohio; and this view of the quay. Rather than copying the old masters inside, as young painters were expected to do, he turned his back on the collection and painted the modern city outside.

He was 26, poor, and still trying to make his name at the Salon. That same year his large Women in the Garden was rejected, and his partner Camille was expecting their first child. The city views are smaller, quicker and more experimental than his Salon pictures.

How it was painted

The canvas is a wide landscape format, about 65 by 93 centimeters. Monet lays out the view in horizontal bands, quay, trees, river, far bank, sky, and keeps the color clear and light, with little of the dark brown underpainting of academic practice. The crowd is painted over the dry ground of the quay in small, separate touches, a technique that anticipates the swarming figures of Boulevard des Capucines six years later. The sky is brushed broadly, with clouds added in thick, pale strokes.

The high viewpoint

The view from above, looking down on a crowd, became a hallmark of Impressionist Paris. Monet would use it again in 1873 on the Boulevard des Capucines, and Pissarro and Caillebotte took it up in the following decades. For a closer look at the crowd here, see Quai du Louvre (detail).

Meaning

The painting is a portrait of Haussmann's Paris in its newest form: broad quays, plane trees, kiosks and carriages, with the old monuments of the city on the horizon. Its subject is the everyday life of the city in clear light, observed without anecdote. The tiny scale of the people turns them into part of the scenery, a crowd in motion rather than characters. For Claude Monet, who would soon leave Paris for the river towns, this was one of his few sustained looks at the capital.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (formerly the Gemeentemuseum) in The Hague, one of the few early Monets in a Dutch public collection. For museums worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings.