Vétheuil in Summer

What you are looking at

A long, low canvas, almost twice as wide as it is high. Across the river, the village of Vétheuil climbs a gentle slope: a jumble of white walls and red-brown roofs, with the tall church tower rising near the center. Poplars stand on the left bank, dark and upright. A strip of green along the water's edge separates the village from its reflection.

The river fills the lower half, and in it everything is repeated and broken into shivering strokes of white, blue, lilac and green. A small rowboat with two figures floats just right of center. The sky is pale blue, streaked with white and gray cloud.

It is a bright, slightly hazy summer day, the light coming from high on the left. The water is still enough to hold a reflection, but just disturbed enough to break it.

Vétheuil, 1878–81

Claude Monet moved to Vétheuil, a village on the Seine northwest of Paris, in 1878, in a shared household with his own family and that of Alice Hoschedé. His wife Camille died there in September 1879. In 1880 he painted the village repeatedly from across the river, from the opposite bank near Lavacourt or from the islands, in different seasons and light. Those years are surveyed on our Monet at Vétheuil page.

This canvas is catalogued by Wildenstein as W.605. Its wide format and low, centered viewpoint recur in several 1880 views of the village, which allowed Monet to compare effects of light on the same motif, an early step toward the series of the 1890s.

How it was painted

The reflection is the subject. Look at the band of water directly beneath the village: the white houses become vertical streaks of white and cream, broken by horizontal strokes of blue that stand for ripples. The church tower is repeated as a faint pale smudge. Monet does not paint a mirror image; he paints what moving water does to it.

The brushwork changes from zone to zone. In the sky it is long and diagonal; in the village it is short and blocky; in the water it is horizontal and choppy, the strokes getting larger as they come toward us. The rowboat, a single dark dab with two tiny figures, gives the scale of the river.

On the left, the poplars and a rounded tree are the darkest notes in the picture, and their reflections drop straight down as columns of green. On the right, the bank is low and grassy, and the village thins out into a few houses before the hills. The overall key is high and light, almost chalky, which gives a sense of summer haze. Even the shadows are pale, mixed with white, so nothing in the picture is truly dark except the poplars. It is the opposite of the somber, low-toned river scenes Monet had painted around Vétheuil only months earlier, in the cold winter after Camille's death.

The Vétheuil river views and how this one differs

Monet painted the village and its river in every season: in winter, after the great freeze of 1879–80, when ice floes choked the Seine, and at sunset; compare The Church at Vétheuil in Winter and another 1880 View of Vétheuil, now in Berlin. The Met's own The Seine at Vétheuil, also of 1880 and almost the same size, shows the village from a similar distance under a different sky. Comparing them is the best way to see Monet testing a motif against changing conditions, a decade before the Haystacks.

This canvas is the most luminous of the group, painted in a near-white key. Its upright companion at the Met, View of Vétheuil, takes the opposite approach, turning from the river to a poppy meadow.

Where to see it

The painting came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951 as a bequest of William Church Osborn (51.30.3). The museum's other Monets, including several from Vétheuil, are described on Monet at the Met.