The Basin at Argenteuil

What you are looking at

The image on this page is a close-up of the upper part of the canvas: the sky. Billows of cumulus, creamy white on top and violet-grey underneath, pile up against a soft blue. Lower down, the clouds break into smaller, flatter puffs, painted with short horizontal dabs that grow thinner toward the horizon. There is no outline anywhere. Every cloud is made of separate touches of paint laid wet beside each other, and in the big central mass you can follow the brush going round in loose, curling movements, as if Monet were modeling the cloud the way a sculptor models clay.

In the full painting this sky takes up more than half the composition. Below it, Claude Monet shows the promenade along the Seine at Argenteuil: a sandy path on the left shaded by a row of tall trees, a few strollers in their shadow, and on the right the wide basin of the river with sailboats, a moored boat and the houses of the far bank. Le Bassin d'Argenteuil was painted in 1872, the year after Monet settled in the town. It measures 60 by 80.5 centimeters, is number 225 in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné, and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Where and when

Argenteuil lies on the Seine about 11 kilometers northwest of Paris, a quarter of an hour by train from the Gare Saint-Lazare. Monet moved there with Camille and their son Jean in December 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War and a year in London and Holland, and rented a house near the river with help from Édouard Manet. He stayed until early 1878.

The "basin" was the broad stretch of the Seine in front of the town, deep and wide enough for sailing, where the Paris yacht clubs held regattas. Along its bank ran a public promenade planted with trees, the stage for the Sunday crowds that came out from the capital. This painting shows that promenade in calm, settled weather, probably in summer, when the trees are in full leaf and the clouds build up through the afternoon. For the whole Argenteuil campaign, see Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

Look at the detail again and you can see how quickly Monet worked. The paint is thick and opaque in the lit tops of the clouds and thin in the blue between them, so in places the pale ground of the canvas shows through. The shadow sides of the clouds are not grey but a mixture of lilac and blue-grey, cooler than the white beside them; that small shift in temperature is what makes them look round.

The lower clouds are painted differently, as flat, horizontal touches that shrink toward the horizon. That is a perspective device. Clouds overhead look large and rounded, clouds near the horizon look flat and crowded together, and Monet's change of stroke gives the sky its depth without a single drawn line.

In the full composition the sky does the work that figures do in older painting. It sets the mood, and the shadows of the clouds, falling as darker patches on the water and the path, tie the two halves of the canvas together. Monet was not describing the shape of particular clouds so much as the light on them in a given half hour.

The motif and its siblings

Monet painted the river at Argenteuil more than any other subject in these years, and 1872 was the year he found its main motifs: the promenade, the boats, the bridges. Close in viewpoint and date are Riverside Path at Argenteuil in Washington and The Harbour at Argenteuil; the sailing pictures, such as Regatta at Argenteuil, show the same basin at closer range. The quieter backwater on the other side of the island appears in The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil.

What sets The Basin apart is its proportion of sky. Compared with the busy regattas, it is almost empty: a low horizon, a few small figures, and above them a great, slowly moving weather system. It points toward the Impressionist landscape at its most essential, a picture of air and light more than of place.

Where to see it

The Basin at Argenteuil hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, which holds one of the largest groups of Argenteuil canvases anywhere: see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay. Nearby you can compare Argenteuil, painted at about the same time. For Monet's life and other periods, see Claude Monet.