View of Vétheuil

What you are looking at

A long, horizontal canvas shows the Seine on a summer day. Across the middle runs a far bank thick with trees: tall, dark poplars stand in a row, and between them rises the square tower of Vétheuil's church. To the right, the pale walls and roofs of the village houses sit low along the water, and green hills climb behind them. A long, low island of silvery willows lies in front of the poplars, its foliage painted in grays and soft greens.

The river is calm and pale, reflecting the sky in blues and lilacs. A small green rowing boat with two figures floats on the left. On our side of the water, at the lower right, a strip of grassy bank runs along the bottom edge, and on it sits a figure in white under a parasol, with a smaller figure beside her, perhaps a woman and child. The sky is full of white cumulus clouds, painted with thick, swirling strokes, and takes up nearly half the canvas.

Where and when it was painted

Monet moved to Vétheuil, a village on the Seine about 60 kilometers downstream of Paris, in 1878, sharing a house with the family of his bankrupt patron Ernest Hoschedé. These were hard years. Camille died there in September 1879, and the family was short of money. The winter of 1879–80 brought deep freezes and the dramatic breakup of the ice on the Seine. The summer of 1880, when this picture was painted, was by contrast a time of renewed work, and Monet painted the village again and again from the river and the opposite bank.

This view, signed and dated 1880, looks across at Vétheuil probably from the far bank near Lavacourt or from one of the islands in the river. It is one of a group of summer views of the village; compare View of Vétheuil and Vétheuil in Summer in the Metropolitan Museum. See Monet at Vétheuil for the whole period.

How it was painted

The composition is built in bands: grass, water, trees and village, hills, sky. The verticals of the poplars and the church tower break the horizontals and give the picture its rhythm. Monet places the tower almost at the center of the canvas but lets it nearly disappear among the trees, so the village feels discovered rather than presented.

The brushwork varies with the subject. The poplars are painted in long, upright strokes of dark green; the willows on the island in soft, feathery dabs of silver-gray; the water in horizontal strokes of blue, lilac and white. The clouds are the most heavily painted part, built up in thick, curling strokes of white with touches of pink and gray. The figures are tiny and summary: the boat a green stroke, the woman under her parasol a few dabs of white. They set the scale and tell us it is summer, a day for boating and sitting by the river.

Monet and Vétheuil

The church tower that sits at the heart of this picture appears in many of Monet's Vétheuil canvases, seen from the river, from the hills and in the snow, as in Vétheuil Church and The Church at Vétheuil in Winter. The figure on the bank recalls Woman Seated under the Willows, painted the same year. After the grief of 1879, the summer pictures of 1880 are among the brightest and calmest Monet ever painted.

Ownership

The painting belongs to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (A I 551), one of the first German museums to collect French Impressionism under its director Hugo von Tschudi at the turn of the twentieth century. It hangs with the museum's other Impressionists, including Monet's Houses at Argenteuil of 1873.

Where to see it

View of Vétheuil is in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Berlin's Museum Island. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.