The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil

What you are looking at

A narrow channel of still water curves away from us under a wide, pale sky. On the right a long row of tall, leafless poplars runs diagonally into the distance along the bank, their trunks and branches a haze of grey-violet, and behind them a red-roofed house shows through the screen of trees. On the left, flat meadow and a few slim trees lead to a distant line of buildings. Near the water's edge, two tiny dark figures, made with a handful of black strokes, stand or crouch on the bank. They might be fishing.

The light is low and soft, the sky streaked with thin cloud in cream and pale yellow. The season looks like late winter or early spring: the trees are bare, the grass a dull green-brown. Reflections of the poplars run down into the water in vertical strokes, broken by small horizontal touches of light.

What makes the picture work is its order. The line of poplars is a strong diagonal that pulls the eye straight back, and the curve of the bank answers it. The two figures are placed exactly where the two lines meet, small enough to give scale without telling a story.

Where and when it was painted

After a year in London and the Netherlands during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, Monet settled at Argenteuil, a small town on the Seine about nine kilometers from Paris, at the end of 1871. Argenteuil was known for its boating and regattas and was already partly industrial, and Monet painted all of it: the basin and the sailboats, the road and railway bridges, the boulevards in snow. See Monet at Argenteuil.

The Petit Bras is something else. It is the side channel separating the Île Marante from the main river, about a mile downstream from the town. The island, with only a few houses, had been a retreat for Parisians since the eighteenth century, and it was far quieter than the boating basin. Monet stood on the left bank and looked west across the Petit Bras toward the island. When he painted the same spot facing the other way, downstream, he included sailboats; here he left them out, and the picture feels empty and almost timeless.

How it was painted

This is an unusually conventional landscape for Monet in these years. Its calm, horizontal composition and silvery tonality recall the river scenes of Charles-François Daubigny and Camille Corot, which were painted only a few years earlier. The sky is laid in with broad, loose strokes; the poplars are built from many fine vertical touches, dry paint dragged over the ground so the trunks seem to flicker; the water mixes both. The canvas, 52.6 by 71.8 centimeters, is a size Monet could finish outdoors.

The little house is the only sign of the present. It looks like a modern villa rather than a cottage, and it is painted no more precisely than the trees around it. Monet does not hide modern Argenteuil here; he simply chooses a spot where it barely registers, and lets the weather and the season carry the picture.

The row of poplars on the right looks forward, nearly twenty years, to the trees he would paint along the river Epte in 1891; compare Poplars on the Epte in the same London collection. For other Argenteuil river views of 1872–73, see Riverside Path at Argenteuil and The Basin at Argenteuil, and for the town under snow, Snow at Argenteuil, also in the National Gallery.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting, catalogued by Wildenstein as number 196, was bequeathed to the National Gallery by Sir Robert Hart in 1971 (NG6395). It is not always on display in Trafalgar Square: in 2025–26 it toured regional British museums, from Norwich to Hull, as the National Gallery's Masterpiece Tour. Check the gallery's website before visiting. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.