Regatta at Argenteuil

What you are looking at

Four or five sailing boats lean on the water at left, their triangular white sails catching full sun, with a smaller sail far behind them. At right, a green bank rises to a cluster of houses, the largest with a bright orange-red roof and walls, half hidden among dark trees; a smaller red-roofed house sits beside it, and a tall poplar-like tree stands up between them. A long pale boat lies drawn up on the bank. A pale blue sky with thin streaks of cloud fills the top third.

Below, the river doubles everything: the sails become long white bars, the house becomes zigzag patches of orange and red, the trees become blotches of green and black. The reflections are the most radical part of the picture. Monet does not blend them; he lays down separate, thick, almost rectangular strokes of pure color side by side on the water, so the surface reads both as rippling river and as flat paint. Seen close, the bottom half looks nearly abstract.

Notice how quickly the boats are made: a few strokes of white for the sail, a dash of dark for the hull and a figure, and the scene is complete. The signature sits at lower right in dark paint, as hurried as the rest.

Argenteuil and the regattas

Monet settled in Argenteuil, a few kilometers downstream from Paris, at the end of 1871. The broad stretch of the Seine there was the most important sailing water near the capital, and regattas were held regularly in summer. Over the next few years Monet, often joined by Renoir, painted the boats, the promenade and the bridges dozens of times.

This picture is small and was probably painted quickly, perhaps in a single session, which gives it its freshness. Monet and Renoir painted side by side at Argenteuil in these years, and the boldness of the broken reflections owes something to that shared experiment.

How it was painted

The canvas is a wide, shallow format, 48 by 75 centimeters, suited to a river view. The sky is brushed thinly; the bank and houses are blocked in with broad strokes; and the water is laid down last, in heavy, separate touches of white, orange, green and blue that sit on the surface without blending. The paint in the reflections is thick enough to catch light, so the water literally glitters.

The Argenteuil boats

Monet returned to the regattas several times, in larger and more finished canvases of 1874. Compare this sunny day with the grey weather of Red Boats at Argenteuil (1875), and with The Basin at Argenteuil and Argenteuil, both in the Orsay and both of around 1872. The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil in London shows the quieter side channel of the river.

Color as structure

The composition is split almost in half. On the left, white sails against blue sky and water: a cool, bright zone. On the right, red and orange houses against green trees: a warm, saturated one. The river joins the two, mixing their colors in its reflections. Red set against green and orange against blue are the two strongest complementary pairs, and Monet places them so that each makes the other more intense. This is design by color rather than by line, and it is one reason the small canvas reads so vividly from across a gallery.

Meaning

The subject is leisure: middle-class Parisians sailing on a summer Sunday, the new suburban pleasures that the railway made possible. But the deeper subject is light on water, the sensation of a bright day rather than any event. That a sketch-like picture like this could be considered a complete painting was one of the propositions Impressionism had to defend, and Claude Monet defended it here with unusual daring.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris; see our guide to Monet at the Musée d'Orsay. It came to the French state in 1894 with the bequest of Gustave Caillebotte, himself a keen sailor and boat designer at Argenteuil. For the Normandy regatta painted five years earlier, see The Regatta at Sainte-Adresse.