The Seine at Port-Villez

Claude Monet's The Seine at Port-Villez shows the river near his home at Giverny dissolved in a pink and lilac haze. A hillside slopes down to the water from the right, a clump of trees is mirrored in the still surface, and almost nothing else is defined. The canvas, 65.4 by 100.3 centimeters (Wildenstein 1373), belongs to Tate, which bought it in 1953, and is on long-term loan to the National Gallery in London. It carries a curious problem of date: it is signed and dated 1885 at lower left, but the National Gallery considers it almost certainly painted in 1894.

What you are looking at

The composition is very simple. A long, smooth hillside descends diagonally from the upper right toward the left, where it meets the river in a low, hazy line. At the right edge, a dense clump of trees in muted green and blue stands at the water's edge, and its reflection drops straight down into the river as a soft, blurred column. Along the far bank, a few tiny touches of pink or red may be roofs.

Everything else is air and water. The sky is a veil of pale pink, mauve and pearl gray, laid on in soft, horizontal strokes. The river repeats it almost exactly, a little cooler and bluer, so that sky and water are nearly indistinguishable. The hill is a darker band of violet-gray between them. Only the trees on the right have any real weight.

The detail to notice is the reflection. Monet paints it with soft vertical strokes that sink into the horizontal strokes of the water, and he lets the trees and their reflection form a single shape, so that the picture can almost be read upside down.

Where and when

Port-Villez is a riverside hamlet on the Seine near Vernon, a short distance from Giverny. Monet painted the river there repeatedly, and in 1894, the year he finished his Rouen Cathedral canvases in the studio, he painted a group of misty views of this stretch of the Seine at different times of day. Other versions include The Seine at Port-Villez, Pink Effect in the Kreeger Museum in Washington and a version in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen.

The 1885 date on the canvas is the puzzle. Monet sometimes signed and dated pictures years after he painted them, when they left the studio, and dates could be added in error. The National Gallery's judgment rests on the picture's style and its close relationship to the 1894 group. The fog-bound, single-effect treatment belongs to the series years of the 1890s, not to the mid-1880s.

How this version differs

Compared with the windblown The Seine at Port-Villez (A Gust of Wind) in Columbus, this is a picture of complete stillness. It is also close in mood to the Mornings on the Seine series that Monet began two years later at Giverny, where the river is again shrouded in mist and trees are mirrored in still water; compare The Seine at Giverny in Washington. The Port-Villez canvases can be seen as a rehearsal for that series.

How it was painted

The paint is thin and evenly applied, with soft, blended strokes and little impasto. The palette is a narrow range of pinks, mauves, gray-blues and gray-greens, all of nearly the same value, so that the picture reads almost as a single tone. This closeness of value is what creates the effect of mist: edges disappear because nothing is much lighter or darker than anything else.

For the river landscapes around Monet's home, see Giverny: Monet's House and Garden.

Where to see it

The painting was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1953 and is on long-term loan to the National Gallery in London, where it hangs with the Gallery's other Monets, including Flood Waters and Irises. See Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.