Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers

Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers is a painting by Claude Monet of pleasure boats moored on the Seine across the river from Argenteuil, dated 1874 by its museum and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 227. It belongs to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a gift of Bruno and Sadie Adriani, and hangs in the Legion of Honor. Where most of Monet's Argenteuil boat pictures keep their distance, this one brings the viewer right in among the hulls.

What you're looking at

The picture is a close-up of a mooring. In the middle ground two dark-hulled sailboats sit side by side, their bare masts painted as long, warm orange-brown strokes running up and out of the top of the canvas, their rigging in fine dark lines. Behind them a third boat still carries a pale gray-green sail. At the right, the white curved hull and furled boom of another yacht cut into the frame, and at lower left the rounded end of a small rowing boat pokes in from the edge.

The water between them is the star of the picture. Monet paints the reflections of masts and hulls as loose, snaking ribbons of dark blue, green and white that wobble down the canvas, the most free and calligraphic brushwork in the painting. On the far bank, at left, are a brown house with an orange roof, a tall dark green tree and a strip of grass; at the far right, on the horizon, small factory chimneys send smoke into a sky of broken cloud. The signature is at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Petit-Gennevilliers lay on the opposite bank of the Seine from Argenteuil, linked to it by the road bridge. Its riverside was lined with boatyards and moorings for the sailing clubs that made Argenteuil famous, and the painter Gustave Caillebotte, a keen yachtsman, later settled there. Monet lived in Argenteuil from late 1871 to early 1878 and crossed the river repeatedly to paint. The chimneys on the horizon are a reminder that the town was also growing as an industrial suburb. See Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

The canvas is a standard size, about 54 by 65 centimeters, and was clearly painted quickly outdoors. The masts and rigging are drawn directly with the brush in single strokes; the sky is laid in thin, cool scumbles; the reflections are applied wet-into-wet in long, wavering marks. Monet uses the strong verticals of the masts against the horizontal ripples to structure the picture, a device he would push further in his views of the Argenteuil basin.

How this version differs

Most of Monet's boat pictures from these years, like Les barques. Régates à Argenteuil or Regatta at Argenteuil, show sails at a distance or in motion. Here the boats are at rest and seen from very close, so the subject becomes the pattern of masts, hulls and reflections. It sits closest to Red Boats at Argenteuil at the Orangerie, another close view of moored boats, and to the reflections in The Basin at Argenteuil.

Argenteuil and the boating craze

In the 1870s Argenteuil was within twenty minutes of Paris by train, and its wide, deep reach of the Seine made it the capital of pleasure sailing near the city. Clubs held regattas there, boatbuilders worked on both banks, and Sunday crowds came out to row, sail and eat at riverside restaurants. Monet's boat pictures record this new leisure world, but they also record its industrial neighbor: the chimneys on the horizon here belong to the factories that were growing along the river at the same time.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, credited as a gift of Bruno and Sadie Adriani. It hangs with the museum's other Impressionist works. For other places to see Monet, see where to see Monet's paintings.