The Seine at Port-Villez (A Gust of Wind)

Claude Monet's The Seine at Port-Villez, sometimes subtitled A Gust of Wind, shows a stretch of the Seine a short distance from Giverny on a blustery day, with clumps of willows tossed by the wind above shallow, reflecting water. Wildenstein catalogues it as number 1264 and dates it to 1890; the Columbus Museum of Art, which owns it, gives the broader date c. 1883–90. The wide canvas measures about 60 by 100 centimeters and is signed at lower left.

What you are looking at

The composition is long and low. Across the middle of the canvas runs a line of riverside vegetation, a few rounded masses of willow and scrub on a bank or island. Every one of them is being pulled the same way by the wind: their leaves are painted in long, sweeping, curling strokes of green and silvery white, as if the undersides of the leaves had been flipped up by a gust. At the far left, a darker clump of trees holds its shape; at the right, a big willow seems to bend under the pressure.

Below, the river is low and shallow. Its surface is a warm, muddy mix of tan, ocher and rose, with a few streaks of gray-blue where it catches the sky, and scattered patches of weed or sandbank. The willows are mirrored in it as broken reflections of green and brown. Behind the trees, a blue-gray hill rises at the right, partly lost in haze.

The sky is the most active part of the picture. It is covered in long, diagonal strokes of cream, pale blue and lilac, all running in the same direction as the wind. They make the air itself visible.

Where and when

Port-Villez is a riverside hamlet on the Seine near Vernon, only a short distance from Giverny, where Monet lived from 1883. He painted the river here on several occasions, most famously in a group of misty views in 1894, one of which is The Seine at Port-Villez in the National Gallery, London. The Columbus picture belongs to the earlier years at Giverny, when he was exploring the river landscapes around his new home by boat and on foot.

The date is uncertain. Wildenstein places it in 1890, the museum suggests a range from the mid-1880s, and the signature does not settle the question. What is clear is that it belongs to the Giverny decade before the great series began.

How this version differs

The 1894 Port-Villez pictures are about stillness and fog: a smooth, pale river, a soft hill, everything bathed in pink or blue mist. This canvas is their opposite. It is about wind and movement, with every stroke slanting in the same direction, and its palette is earthy rather than pastel. It is closer in spirit to Monet's windy coastal pictures and to the restless foliage of his poplar studies on the Epte, such as Bend in the Epte River near Giverny. The Poplars of 1891 would make the effect of wind on trees one of their main subjects.

How it was painted

The handling is fast and gestural. Monet drags a loaded brush in long arcs through the willows, letting the strokes stay visible. The sky is laid in with broad, parallel, almost scraped strokes. The water is smoother, with the reflections dabbed in and then crossed by horizontal touches. The overall tonality is warm and earthy.

For Monet's river landscapes around his home, see Giverny: Monet's House and Garden, and for the later Seine series, Mornings on the Seine.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. See also Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.