The Coal Workers

What you are looking at

The arch of an iron road bridge spans the top of the picture, its girders blue-grey against a hazy, pinkish-white sky, its deck lined with tiny figures and a railing. Below it, coal barges are moored along the riverbank, low and heavy in the water, two tall masts rising from them. From the barges, narrow planks slope up to the quay, and along the planks walks a procession of men, each bent under a big basket of coal balanced on his head and shoulders, each a dark, faceless silhouette. They move in both directions, loaded going up, empty coming back, in a rhythm that repeats across the whole canvas.

Through the arch, the river continues into a pale haze, with more barges, a far bridge, the shapes of buildings and a row of factory chimneys. The foreground is darkest: heaps of black coal in the barges at lower left, with the green water glinting between the hulls. Monet signed the canvas at lower right.

Claude Monet painted the scene around 1875 on the Seine at Asnières, just outside Paris. The canvas measures 54 by 66 centimeters, is number 364 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Where and when

According to the Musée d'Orsay, the bridge that frames the view is the road bridge at Asnières, with the bridge at Clichy faint in the distance. Coal for the factories and gasworks of the industrial suburbs was unloaded here by hand, the porters known as déchargeurs or charbonniers carrying it up from the barges basket by basket.

Monet was then living at Argenteuil, a few stops down the line, and took the train into Paris across the railway bridge at Asnières, so he passed scenes like this regularly. The picture was sold at auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 24 March 1875 under the title Les Charbonniers, which suggests it was painted in the winter of 1874–75 or shortly before. See Monet at Argenteuil for those years.

An unusual subject for Monet

Monet almost never painted labor. His river pictures of the same years are full of sailing, strolling and gardens, the leisure of the middle class. The Coal Workers is a rare exception. It shows the other side of the same river, the work that powered the city, and the museum calls it atypical in his output.

The painting does not preach. Unlike the social realism of Gustave Courbet or Jean-François Millet, it does not dwell on the men's faces or their suffering. They are anonymous shapes, part of the machinery of the scene, and the picture's interest lies as much in their pattern as in their plight.

How it was painted

The composition is built on repetition. The planks run in parallel diagonals from lower left to right; the men are spaced along them almost evenly; the barges echo one another; the bridge's ribs repeat overhead. That rhythm, and the silhouetted figures, owe something to the Japanese woodblock prints Monet collected, which often show rows of laborers or travelers against a pale ground, a link the Orsay also draws.

Look at the color. The palette is unusually dark for Monet in the mid-1870s: black, brown and grey-green in the barges and figures, set against a pale, smoky sky and a bright green strip of water. The figures are painted thinly and quickly, a few flat strokes each, while the baskets get thicker touches of dark paint. The haze beyond the arch is laid in soft cream and lilac, the factory chimneys only a few vertical marks.

The motif and its siblings

Asnières and the industrial Seine appear elsewhere in Monet's work of 1873–75: compare The Seine at Asnières in Cologne and Landscape: The Seine at Asnières in Saint Petersburg. The bridge-and-train pictures of The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil and, two years later, Gare Saint-Lazare show the same interest in the modern machinery around Paris.

Where to see it

The painting came to the Musée d'Orsay in 1993, accepted by the French state in lieu of inheritance tax. See Monet at the Musée d'Orsay, and for the artist, Claude Monet.