The Boats

What you are looking at

Two wooden rowing boats lie side by side, seen from above and close up, their bows pointing toward the top left. Their hulls are a warm honey brown, the planks, ribs and thwarts picked out in darker lines, and each has a pair of oars lying along the seats, the nearer pair tinted a faded green. A pale rope loops down from each boat to a weathered wooden post at the bottom of the canvas. Around them the water is almost black-green in the shadow of the hulls, broken into short horizontal flicks of blue, lilac and white where light catches the ripples.

The picture is tightly cropped. The far boat runs off the top edge and the near one almost touches the right edge, so there is no bank, no horizon and no sky. Everything we know about the setting comes from the water and the light on it.

This small canvas, called Barques in French, was painted by Claude Monet in 1869. It measures 33 by 46.5 centimeters, is number 137 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Kunsthalle Bremen, which also owns Monet's full-length portrait Camille (Woman in Green Dress).

Where and when

In 1869 Monet was living at Saint-Michel near Bougival, on the Seine west of Paris, with Camille Doncieux and their two-year-old son Jean, so short of money that at times he could not buy paint. That summer he and Pierre-Auguste Renoir worked side by side at La Grenouillère, a floating café and bathing place on the river at Croissy, where rowing boats for hire lay moored in rows at the water's edge.

In Monet's views of La Grenouillère, the moored boats in the foreground are painted exactly like these, in quick, loaded strokes, while the water around them is broken into separate flecks of color. Barques reads like a close-up study of that motif, though there is no evidence it was painted at La Grenouillère itself rather than elsewhere on that stretch of river.

How it was painted

What makes the picture modern is the water. Monet does not blend it into a smooth surface; he lays down separate dashes of dark green, blue and white side by side, each stroke roughly the shape of a ripple, and lets the eye mix them into the shimmer of moving water. Look at the right-hand side, where the light is strongest: the white and blue strokes are thick and slightly raised, catching real light on the canvas.

The boats are handled differently, with longer strokes that follow the planking and a warm, almost uniform ochre that makes the wood glow against the cold water. The ropes are single curving lines of pale paint dragged across the darker surface.

Notice the viewpoint, too. We look down on the boats from the bank, so they fill the frame at an angle and are cut off at the edges, a cropping that feels closer to photography or Japanese prints than to traditional marine painting. The reflections are just a few darker strokes beneath the hulls. The small size and direct handling suggest a single session outdoors.

The motif and its siblings

The moored boat stayed with Monet for the rest of his career. Compare the crowded boats in La Grenouillère in London and La Grenouillère in New York, both painted that summer, and the nearby river road of The Bridge at Bougival. At Argenteuil in the 1870s the boats became sailboats and his own floating studio boat; at Giverny in the 1880s, the empty rowing boat of The Barque returns to this same close, downward look.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Kunsthalle Bremen, a museum founded by a citizens' art association in 1823, whose Monet holdings are anchored by the 1866 portrait of Camille. As a small work it is not always on display, so check before visiting. For other museums with Monet's work, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for his life, Claude Monet. For the technique he was developing here, see How Monet Painted.