The Boat at Giverny

What you are looking at

Three young women in white and pale blue sit in a long, pointed rowing boat, low on dark water. The one standing at left, in a straw hat with her hair loose down her back, holds a fishing rod out over the side, one hand on her hip. The two seated behind her wear wide hats, one yellow straw, one with a green band; the third also holds a rod, its line running out of the picture at right. Two thin mooring poles stand upright in the water beside the boat.

There is no sky and no horizon. The background is a wall of dense green foliage, worked with flecks of blue, rust and violet, and the lower half of the canvas is water so still that the boat and its passengers are repeated upside down beneath them, their white dresses turned into wavering pale shapes with warm orange-brown at their edges. At bottom left a few blue-violet touches suggest flowers or water plants at the bank.

The painting is known in French as En norvégienne, "in the Norwegian boat," after the light, pointed rowing boat of a type then fashionable on French rivers. Claude Monet painted it around 1887. It measures 97.5 by 130.5 centimeters, is number 1151 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Where and when

Monet had moved to Giverny, a village where the river Epte meets the Seine some 75 kilometers northwest of Paris, in April 1883, with Alice Hoschedé and their combined family of eight children. By the later 1880s the household's boats were moored on the Epte and its backwaters near the house, and the Hoschedé daughters became his models on the water and in the meadows. See Giverny: Monet's House and Garden.

The three women are Alice's daughters, Monet's future stepdaughters (he married Alice in 1892). The Orsay identifies them, from left to right, as Germaine, Suzanne and Blanche Hoschedé. Suzanne was Monet's favorite model in these years, the figure under the parasol in Woman with a Parasol, Turned to the Left. Blanche, at the right, painted alongside Monet and later married his son Jean.

How it was painted

The composition is unusual and deliberate. The boat is cut off at the right edge and set high, and the space is flattened: foliage, figures and reflections are stacked up the canvas like the panels of a screen. That flatness and the high, cropped viewpoint owe something to the Japanese prints Monet collected and hung on the walls at Giverny.

Look at how differently he treats the three zones. The foliage is a mass of short, crossing strokes in many greens with no single leaf described. The figures are painted more broadly, with the white dresses built from cream, lilac and blue rather than pure white. The reflections are longer and softer, laid in vertical drags that break up at the edges, so the water reads as faintly moving even though the scene is calm.

The rods and poles are the only hard, straight lines in the picture. They cut across the soft surfaces and give it a framework. Given the size of the canvas, Monet probably began it outdoors and finished it in the studio.

The motif and its siblings

In the late 1880s Monet painted a group of boating pictures on the Epte, often with the Hoschedé girls as models: The Blue Boat, the empty rowing boat of The Barque in the Musée Marmottan, and later Boating on the River Epte in São Paulo, which uses the same boat and steep viewpoint. They were among his last major figure paintings before he turned to the series of haystacks and poplars.

The theme of a picture without sky, built from reflections in still water, leads directly to the water garden he dug in 1893 and to the Water Lilies.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay: see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay. For Monet's life at Giverny and earlier, see Claude Monet.