View of a Port

View of a Port (Vue d'un port) is a harbor scene by Claude Monet catalogued to 1871 (Wildenstein 169), a year he spent mostly outside France, in London and then at Zaandam in Holland. It shows a working river port on a gray day, crowded with steamers and smoke. The painting is in a private collection and has appeared at auction at Christie's; the specific port it depicts has not been firmly identified.

What you are looking at

The water fills the lower half of the canvas, a pale, milky green broken into short horizontal strokes of lighter green and white. In the foreground a small rowing boat with four or five figures, painted in a few dark touches, slides across it, and just beyond, a single sailboat with a gray sail leans to the left.

On the right, moored against a quay, sits the main subject: a steamer with a dark upper deck, a red-orange hull and a tall black funnel, beside a smaller craft. Behind it rise the masts and rigging of sailing ships and the dark, low roofs of warehouses. From the steamer's funnel and from others further back, thick clouds of brown-gray smoke billow up and roll leftward across the sky, which is a soft gray-white with touches of blue. In the middle distance at left a long, low bridge crosses the water, with buildings and more smoke above it. The signature is at lower right.

The composition is simple: water below, smoke above, and the dark mass of ships anchored on the right. The rowing boat and the sailboat lead the eye diagonally in toward the steamer, and the smoke carries it back out across the sky. Even the bridge is half-veiled in haze, so that the whole port seems to be dissolving into its own exhaust.

Where and when it was painted

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Monet left France for London, where he painted the Thames and the parks until the spring of 1871, including The Thames below Westminster. That summer he moved to Zaandam, near Amsterdam, and painted its harbors and windmills, as in Zaandam and Houses on the Achterzaan. A river port with steamers, sailing ships and a long bridge would fit his London Pool views of 1871, but without a confirmed catalogue description we leave the location open. For the London pictures, see our Monet in London hub.

How it was painted

The handling is quick and broad. Monet lays in the water in flat, parallel strokes of two or three greens, leaves the boats as silhouettes, and spends most of his energy on the smoke, which he paints in big, loose, scumbled masses of brown and gray, the most active part of the picture. The light palette and the soft, even gray daylight are typical of his work in 1871. Smoke and steam, the signs of the modern industrial port, interested him from now on, from Impression, Sunrise at Le Havre in 1872 to the Gare Saint-Lazare series of 1877.

Where to see it

The painting is privately owned and not on public view. For Monet's harbor and river pictures of these years in public collections, see where to see Monet's paintings; the National Gallery, London, holds The Thames below Westminster, and the Musée d'Orsay holds Zaandam.