The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect

The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect (Le Port du Havre, effet de nuit) is a night view of the harbor at Le Havre that Claude Monet painted in 1872, during the same visit to his hometown that produced Impression, Sunrise. Dark masts and hulls stand in deep blue water, lit only by the lamps of the port and their reflections. The painting belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, which catalogues it as Wildenstein 264.

What you are looking at

At first glance the canvas is almost uniformly dark: a deep blue-green that runs from the water up into the night sky with hardly a break. Slowly shapes appear. On the left, tall masts and rigging rise out of the darkness, crowded together, with the dim hulls of ships below. On the right, close to us, a single large mast and a dark sail lean across the picture, and in the lower right the bow of a boat noses into view.

Across the middle runs a line of lights, the lamps along the far quays, painted as small dots of white and pale yellow. Below each one, on the water, hangs a broken vertical reflection, a short column of dashes in yellow, white or pale green. Two or three lights are red, and their reflections burn like small flames in the dark water near the center. A greenish glow at lower left suggests another lamp, out of sight. The sky is a slightly lighter blue than the water, with faint streaks of cloud. There is no moon.

Where and when it was painted

In 1872 Monet returned to Le Havre, the port at the mouth of the Seine where he had grown up, and painted a group of harbor views from a window overlooking the outer port. The most famous of them, Impression, Sunrise, shows the same harbor at dawn, in orange and blue. The Museum Barberini describes this night view as a pendant to that picture, and states that it was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874, where Impression, Sunrise gave the movement its name. Le Havre and the rest of the coast are covered on our Normandy coast hub.

How it was painted

The picture is painted thinly and quickly, with the dark ground doing much of the work. Monet laid in the blue-black of sky and water in broad, fluid strokes, then drew the masts with a few dark lines and placed the lights and reflections on top in small, separate touches of pure color. The effect depends on contrast: a few bright points against a field of dark. It is the same principle he used at dawn in Impression, Sunrise, with its single orange sun, applied to the much harder problem of painting by artificial light. He had tried a night harbor before, as a young man at Honfleur, in A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight, but there the light came from the moon; here it comes from the gas lamps of a modern industrial port.

The Le Havre harbor pictures

The 1872 harbor views include Impression, Sunrise and other paintings of ships and docks, and Monet returned in 1874 for Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor, Le Havre and Embankment in Le Havre. In 1873 he painted the harbor seen from the museum in The Museum at Le Havre, now in London. Compared with all of these, the night effect is the most daring: an almost dark picture, held together by a handful of lights.

Where to see it

The painting is part of the Hasso Plattner Collection, one of the largest private collections of Impressionist painting, shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, near Berlin. Like other works from the collection it is sometimes lent elsewhere, so check the museum's online collection for its current location. The Barberini also shows Monet's Venice canvas Le Palais Ducal. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.