The Barque

What you are looking at

An empty rowing boat floats at the top of a large, nearly square canvas. There is no shore, no sky and no horizon: the whole picture is water, seen from above, filled with long, trailing strands of weed that sway in the current and with the shifting colors of reflected light. The boat is the only solid thing in the scene, and it is cut off by the edge of the frame, as if it were drifting out of view.

Claude Monet painted La Barque in 1887 at Giverny, on the river Epte, where he had settled with Alice Hoschedé and their combined family four years earlier. The canvas measures 146 by 133 centimeters and is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which received it in 1966 with the bequest of the painter's son Michel Monet.

Looking closely

The first thing to notice is what is missing. Monet removes every reference point we normally use to read a landscape. Without a horizon, the water becomes a vertical surface, a wall of color. The boat, tilted and cropped, sits near the top like an object placed on a tabletop. This high, flattened viewpoint owes a good deal to Japanese prints, which Monet collected and hung throughout his house at Giverny.

The water is painted with long, sinuous strokes that follow the movement of the weed beneath the surface. The water is very dark, close to black in places, a deep mass of blue-black and green; through it run thin, flickering strokes of red, ochre and yellow-green, the weed catching the light under the surface. It is hard to tell what is reflection, what is plant and what is the riverbed showing through. The surface reads as a single living field rather than a view into depth.

At the top of the canvas a mass of green leaves hangs down over the boat from a bank we cannot see, the only hint that land is near. The boat itself is the lightest thing in the picture: a pale, almost white hull seen from above, with reddish-brown floorboards and grey seats, painted in firm, flat strokes that contrast with the restless water. It is empty. The absence of the rowers, whom Monet painted elsewhere, gives the picture a stillness that some viewers find melancholy and others simply contemplative.

Monet's boating pictures of 1887

Monet's sketchbooks show the boat motif first appearing in 1887. That summer and the next he painted several large canvases of the Hoschedé daughters, Suzanne and Blanche, boating and fishing on the Epte. The best known are in the Musée d'Orsay and elsewhere; see The Boat at Giverny, in which three young women in white sit in a skiff above their reflections.

La Barque is the most radical of the group. Having painted the boat with its passengers, Monet painted it again without them, and let the water take over. The Marmottan describes it as prefiguring the experiments with the Water Lilies that would occupy him from the late 1890s.

The boat also links to Monet's past. At Argenteuil in the 1870s he had a floating studio built, which he painted in The Studio Boat, and boats on the Seine run through his work of that decade. At Giverny the boat becomes less a subject than a way of looking: from the water, close to the surface, with the bank left out.

What does it mean?

Monet left no statement about this picture, and it is best not to over-read it. But its interest is clear from the composition. By removing the horizon and the figures, Monet turns a river scene into an image about looking itself: the eye moving over a surface that mixes depth and reflection. Art historians have often traced a line from paintings like this to the immersive, edgeless water lily canvases and, beyond them, to the large-scale abstraction of the twentieth century.

There is also a personal dimension. The Hoschedé daughters were central to Monet's life at Giverny; Suzanne was his favorite model, and Blanche, herself a painter, later married his son Jean and looked after Monet in old age. An empty boat, in a series otherwise full of them, is hard to see without thinking of the people who usually sat in it.

From the Epte to the water lily pond

A few years later Monet bought land across the road from his house, diverted a branch of the Epte, and created the pond that he would paint for the rest of his life. Pictures such as The Water Lily Pond and the later Water Lilies carry forward exactly what La Barque introduced: the high viewpoint, the lost horizon, and water as a field of reflection and growth.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, which holds the largest collection of Monet's work in the world, much of it from Michel Monet's 1966 bequest. It is usually displayed in the museum's lower-level Monet galleries, alongside many of the late Giverny canvases. For more of his river pictures, see our guide to famous Monet paintings.