The Seine at Giverny

Claude Monet's The Seine at Giverny belongs to the series known as the Mornings on the Seine, painted at dawn on a quiet arm of the river near his home in 1896 and 1897. Rounded masses of trees float on a pale, still river, and their reflections sink into water and mist that are almost the same color as the sky. The canvas, 81.5 by 100.5 centimeters (Wildenstein 1494), is signed at lower left. It is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, part of the Chester Dale Collection.

What you are looking at

The picture is built on a horizontal axis. A line of trees runs across the middle of the canvas: a low, soft mass on the left, a gap, and then a bigger, taller clump on the right that rises into a rounded dome. The trees are painted in blue-green, sage, turquoise and touches of rust and ocher, as if catching the first warmth of the sun.

Below, the river mirrors them almost perfectly. The reflections are slightly darker and redder, in plum and brown, and they hang down like a second, inverted grove. The National Gallery's description puts it simply: the rounded, feathery canopies of trees are mirrored in the placid surface of the river.

Everything else is mist. The sky above and the open water below are a single expanse of pale cream, peach and pink, with soft, diagonal strokes that suggest drifting fog. Where the trees meet the water, the edges blur, and in places you cannot tell where the bank ends.

The detail to look for is the far right edge. Beyond the big clump, a smaller, paler cluster of trees and a sliver of blue water show where the river opens out, the only hint of distance in an otherwise closed, intimate view.

Where and when

Monet began the Mornings on the Seine in the summer of 1896 and continued in 1897. He rose before dawn, rowed out on his studio boat to a spot where a branch of the Seine runs past wooded islands near Giverny, and painted the same view at successive moments as the mist lifted, working on several canvases at once. Around twenty canvases resulted, and he exhibited a group of them at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1898.

How this version differs

The series varies mainly in color and in the density of the fog. In some canvases, like the Musée Marmottan's Arm of the Seine near Giverny, Sunrise, the mist is heavy and blue-violet; in others, like the Metropolitan Museum's Morning on the Seine near Giverny, the light is cooler and more silvery. The Washington canvas is among the warmest: the mist is peach and cream, and the trees carry touches of rust and gold. It also gives more space to the big clump on the right, which makes the composition less symmetrical than many of its siblings; compare the Musée d'Orsay's Arm of the Seine near Giverny.

For the whole group, see our hub on the Mornings on the Seine.

How it was painted

The brushwork is loose and visible throughout, but it is softer than in Monet's earlier landscapes. The trees are built of short, curving, overlapping strokes; the reflections of vertical, slightly dragged strokes; the mist of long, thin diagonals. Colors are close in value, so that nothing stands out sharply, and the warm pinks and creams of the fog are repeated, slightly darker, in the trees and their reflections. The effect is of a single, unified atmosphere.

These pictures, with their reflections and dissolving forms, lead directly to the Water Lilies Monet began painting soon after.

Ownership and where to see it

Monet sold the painting to James F. Sutton, a New York dealer and founder of the American Art Association. After Sutton's sale in 1933, it was bought on behalf of the collector Chester Dale, and it came to the National Gallery of Art with his bequest in 1963. It is on view in the West Building. See Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.