The Studio Boat

What you are looking at

A small boat with a boxy green cabin sits alone in the middle of a wide, still river. Its black hull rides low in the water; the cabin has a curved, pale roof, a couple of small windows and an open door, dark inside. A thin pole rises from the deck, and a second pole stands in the water just in front, perhaps a mooring stake. Behind, a far bank of dark, rounded trees and a pale house closes the view. Everything is doubled in the water below, the green cabin turning into a wavering green block, the trees into long brown and violet smears.

The light is low and soft, a late-afternoon or evening haze that turns sky and river the same pale gray-lilac. Nothing moves, and nobody is on board.

Monet's floating studio

In 1873 or 1874 Claude Monet bought a boat and had a wooden cabin built on it so he could paint on the Seine itself. The idea came from Charles-François Daubigny, the Barbizon landscapist, who had worked from his own studio boat, the Botin, since the 1850s. From the water Monet could set up in midstream, follow the light along the river and get the low, water-level viewpoint that gives his Argenteuil pictures their sense of immersion. In the summer of 1874 Édouard Manet painted Monet at work in it, with Camille sitting in the cabin doorway, in a picture now in Munich.

Here Monet turns the tool into the subject. This canvas, Wildenstein W.323, is one of a handful he made of the boat itself, all from the Argenteuil years mapped on our Monet at Argenteuil page.

How it was painted

The reflection is longer than the boat. Monet pulls the dark hull down into the water in a broad band of black and green, then lets the strokes break apart near the bottom edge, so the boat seems to rest on its own shadow. To the left, the reflections of the trees are painted in long horizontal sweeps of brown, ocher and lilac, almost a separate abstract picture.

The cabin is the only strong color, a cool mint green with a darker door. Monet places it slightly right of center and leaves a wide margin of empty water around it, which makes the boat look small and still. Notice the pole in front of the hull: its reflection is a column of short dashes, broken by tiny ripples that we never see on the surface itself.

The sky is barely there, a band of pale buff at the top edge, and the far bank is laid in with soft, blurred masses rather than individual trees. This is one of Monet's most tonal pictures of the 1870s, closer to the misty river views of Daubigny and Corot than to the bright regattas he painted in the same months. The signature at lower left is painted in the same dark brown as the trees.

The studio boat pictures and how this one differs

Monet painted the boat several times. A version in the Barnes Foundation, The Studio Boat (Le Bateau-atelier), dated 1876, shows it moored among reeds with a figure aboard in brighter light; another is in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel. The Otterlo canvas is the emptiest and most hushed of the group: no figure, no sunshine, just the floating hut and its reflection.

The boat also appears as a detail in other Argenteuil pictures, moored near the bank in views of the road bridge and the basin. Compare its dusky stillness with the snapping flags of Regatta at Argenteuil, or with the later The Boat at Giverny, where Monet again paints a small craft swallowed by its reflections.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands (KM 111.222), a museum set in the Hoge Veluwe national park and best known for its Van Gogh holdings. For other collections with Monet's river pictures, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.