The Seine at Argenteuil

What you are looking at

The Seine runs away from us into the distance, flat and glassy, between two banks. On the left, a line of tall, thin poplars in full autumn color, ocher and orange, marches toward the horizon and doubles itself in the water. On the right, a green bank scrubbed with russet bushes leads to a pair of pale villas with red roofs. Far off, near the center, the spire of Argenteuil's church and a cluster of houses sit right on the horizon. Above everything is a high, pale sky streaked with small clouds tipped in yellow.

The light is low and slanting, the light of a late autumn afternoon. Claude Monet signed the canvas in the lower right corner, in dark paint over the green of the bank.

Argenteuil, 1873

This canvas (Wildenstein W.198) dates from 1873, Monet's second year at Argenteuil, the boating town on the Seine where he lived from late 1871 to 1878. It is a quiet, almost classical picture compared with the regattas and bridges he painted nearby. The view looks along the river with the promenade of trees on the left, a motif he returned to in pictures such as Riverside Path at Argenteuil and The Basin at Argenteuil.

1873 was a good year for Monet. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was buying his work, the family lived comfortably in a rented house with a garden, and Monet was painting at full stretch. The calm of this picture reflects that settled moment, a few months before the first Impressionist exhibition of April 1874. The town and its river are surveyed on our Monet at Argenteuil page.

How it was painted

The reflections carry the picture. The poplars are painted in vertical strokes of gold and brown, and their reflections are the same strokes pulled down into the water and slightly broken, with blue sky showing between them. Monet does not draw the waterline; the bank simply turns into its own mirror image. Look closely at the near end of the row and you will see a dark band of shadow at the foot of the trees, the only firm horizontal on the left.

The sky is worth a long look. It is not a flat blue but a mixture of lilac, gray-blue and white, brushed in different directions, with the small clouds touched in yellow where the low sun catches them. The same yellow returns in the trees and the bushes, so the whole picture is held together by one warm note against one cool one.

On the right, the foreground is the busiest area: scrubby strokes of rust, olive and green for bushes, a lighter strip of grass, and a worn path. The tiny houses and the church against the vast sky show how flat and open the landscape around Argenteuil was. Monet keeps the horizon low, about a third of the way up, and gives the weather most of the space.

The Argenteuil riverbank and how this view differs

Monet painted the promenade along the Petit Bras of the Seine many times, in summer with strollers and sailboats, in winter under snow. Most of those pictures are busy with people and boats. This one is nearly empty, and it is one of the few in which autumn color is the subject. Compare Argenteuil in the Orsay, with its sailing boats under the same trees, or Autumn Effect at Argenteuil in the Courtauld, painted the same autumn, in which a wall of orange foliage blazes against blue.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the national collections of the Musée d'Orsay (RF 1951 13) and is recorded on long-term deposit at the Musée de Grenoble (DG 2011-1-1), so check before traveling to Paris to see it. Grenoble's museum has one of the strongest collections of modern painting in a French regional city. The Orsay's other Monets are gathered on Monet at the Musée d'Orsay.