Vétheuil in the Fog

Vétheuil dans le brouillard (Vétheuil in the Fog) is a view by Claude Monet of the village of Vétheuil on the Seine, where he lived from 1878 to 1881, seen across the river through morning fog. Signed and dated 1879 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 518, it stayed with Monet all his life, passed to his son Michel, and came to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris with Michel Monet's bequest in 1966.

What you're looking at

The picture is almost all fog. A band of blue-gray and pale violet fills the sky, thickening toward the top. Through it, across the middle of the canvas, the village emerges as a line of soft, pale shapes: low houses, trees and, a little right of center, the tall mass of the church of Notre-Dame of Vétheuil, its tower touched with pinkish orange where the rising sun reaches it through the haze.

Below, the Seine reflects the scene as vertical streaks of pale pink, cream and blue, broken by short horizontal strokes on the water's surface. There is no foreground bank, no boat and no figure; we seem to look from the river itself, as Monet often did from his studio boat. The signature and date, Claude Monet 79, are at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet moved to Vétheuil, a village on a bend of the Seine some 50 kilometers downstream from Paris, in September 1878, sharing a house with Ernest and Alice Hoschedé and their children. It was a period of debt and of family crisis: Camille was already ill and died in September 1879. Monet worked constantly along the river, painting the village and its church from the water and from the far bank in every season. See Monet at Vétheuil.

Monet later told the story of this canvas himself. Short of money, he offered it to the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, a major collector of his work, who refused it; years later, after the painting had become admired, Faure wanted it and Monet would not sell. The anecdote, repeated by the Marmottan, comes from Monet's own recollections and should be taken as such, but it fits the fact that he kept the canvas until his death.

How it was painted

The surface is thin and evenly worked, with very little contrast of value. Monet builds the fog from overlapping, semi-transparent layers of blue, lilac and white, letting a few warmer touches show through for the light on the church and the houses. The vertical reflections are dragged down with a dry brush, and the water's surface is suggested by a few short horizontals laid over them. It is one of his earliest pictures in which the subject is the atmosphere between the painter and the motif rather than the motif itself, an idea he would return to in London twenty years later.

How it compares

Vétheuil and its church appear in many canvases of these years, from the snowbound Church in Vétheuil in Winter to the bright Vétheuil in Summer. In those the village is solid and legible; here it is a ghost. The closest relatives are the pale, near-monochrome winter pictures painted a few months later, such as Frost, and, much later, the misty London views like Waterloo Bridge at Dusk.

The church of Vétheuil

The church of Notre-Dame at Vétheuil, begun in the twelfth century and enlarged in the sixteenth, stands on a slope above the river and dominates the village from every direction. Monet painted it from the water, from the opposite bank at Lavacourt, from the hillside and from close by in the snow. In this canvas it is the only clearly identifiable building, a faint vertical rising out of the fog, and its presence is what tells us we are looking at Vétheuil at all.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (inventory 5024), part of the bequest of Monet's son Michel in 1966, which made the museum the largest single collection of Monet's work. See the Musée Marmottan Monet.