The Blue Boat

What you are looking at

We look down at a boat at close range, as if from the bank or from another boat alongside. Its hull, painted a pale blue-white, cuts diagonally across the canvas from lower left to the right edge, and it is cropped at both ends. Two young women sit in it facing each other, both in long white summer dresses and wide straw hats trimmed with green. The one on the left leans back with an arm on the gunwale; the one on the right sits with her back half turned to us, her face hidden under her hat.

The water fills the rest of the picture. At the top it reflects the green of the riverbank in loose, wavy strokes; lower down it turns deep blue and violet in the shadow of the boat. Inside the boat, the floorboards and seats are a cool blue, and the white dresses are shot through with lilac, blue and green from the surrounding water and sky.

The thing most people miss is that there is almost no pure white in the dresses. Monet paints them in the colors of their surroundings, so the women seem to be made of the same light as the river.

Where and when it was painted

In the summer of 1887 Monet, then living at Giverny with Alice Hoschedé and their combined family, painted a series of large pictures of the Hoschedé girls boating on the Epte, the small river that runs into the Seine near the village. The household's daughters, Marthe, Blanche, Suzanne and Germaine, were his models. The two women here are almost certainly two of them, but sources disagree on which: some name Marthe and Blanche, others Suzanne and another sister.

The same summer produced The Boat at Giverny (En norvégienne), now in the Musée d'Orsay, with three girls fishing from a long boat, and the empty boat seen from above in The Barque at the Musée Marmottan Monet. Three years later he returned to the theme in Boating on the River Epte in São Paulo. For the village and river, see Giverny: Monet's house and garden.

How it was painted

The canvas is large, 109 by 129 centimeters, almost square, and the figures are life-size or nearly so. After a decade of mostly unpeopled landscapes, Monet was trying in 1886–87 to paint figures in the open air again, as he had in the 1860s, and was arguing with himself about it in letters; the two versions of Woman with a Parasol of 1886 belong to the same effort.

His solution here is to dissolve the figures into the setting. The high viewpoint removes the horizon and makes the water a flat backdrop, as in a Japanese print. The faces are barely indicated. The strokes on the dresses follow the same rhythms as the ripples on the water. What matters is the boat's diagonal and the play of reflected color on white cloth.

It is also a picture about leisure. The boat is not working, and nobody is rowing; the women are simply on the water on a summer day. In that sense it continues the boating pictures of Argenteuil in the 1870s, but moved from a busy suburban basin to a private stretch of river and a family circle.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting, catalogued by Wildenstein as number 1153, was in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza family until 1976, when it was sold. It is now in a private collection, and some older references wrongly place it in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. To see Monet's boating pictures of these years in public collections, go to the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris or the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.