Zaandam

What you are looking at

A calm river runs from the left foreground into the distance. On the right bank, a row of tall trees leans over the water, and beneath them stand narrow wooden houses painted in the bright green typical of the Zaan region, with red-tiled roofs and stepped gables. A grassy bank, ocher and pink in the sun, slopes down to the water, where a few small boats and ducks sit near the shore. On the left, across the water, a domed building and a church with a tall, thin spire rise above a line of trees. Above everything, half the canvas is sky, blue with heaped white and gray clouds, and the clouds are mirrored in the river below.

It is a bright, breezy summer day. The trees on the right throw the houses into partial shade, so the green walls glow out of darkness.

Zaandam, 1871

After leaving London in the spring of 1871, Claude Monet went to Zaandam, a busy industrial town on the river Zaan north of Amsterdam, with Camille and their son Jean. They stayed from June to October, and he painted about two dozen canvases there. He wrote to Camille Pissarro that there was enough to paint for a lifetime. The town was known for its windmills and its green-painted wooden houses, both of which he recorded. This canvas is catalogued by Wildenstein as W.183.

The Dutch trip was a turning point. Monet sold several of the paintings, his finances briefly improved, and back in France he settled at Argenteuil at the end of the year. The London months that preceded Zaandam are described on Monet in London.

How it was painted

The river is the best passage. Monet paints it in short, horizontal strokes of blue, white and gray, with the reflections of the houses and trees pulled down as broken vertical bands of green and brown. The reflection of the bright clouds turns the left half of the water almost white.

Look at the green houses on the right. They are painted with flat, bright strokes of emerald, with crisp white touches for windows and gables, and they glow against the dark mass of trees above them. The church spire on the left is a single dark stroke, but it immediately gives the view its location and scale. The sky is lively and quickly painted, in thick white over blue, and takes up as much space as the town.

The bank on the right is a small surprise: warm pinks and oranges, with a scatter of dark dots for ducks or stones at the waterline. The signature at lower left is in dark paint over the gray-white water.

The palette is brighter than in the London pictures of the previous winter. Monet seems to have shed the grays of the Thames almost as soon as he arrived, and the clear Dutch light, with its strong blues and whites, set the tone for the high-keyed river pictures he would paint at Argenteuil over the next few years.

The Zaandam pictures and how this one differs

Monet's Dutch views fall into a few groups: windmills, as in Windmill and Boats near Zaandam in Copenhagen; the waterfront houses close up, as in Houses on the Riverbank in Zaandam in Frankfurt and Houses on the Achterzaan at the Met; and broader views of the town along the river, like this one. The Orsay canvas is among the most balanced of these, giving equal weight to sky, water and town, and among the brightest in color.

Its structure, a river receding diagonally with a tree-lined bank on one side, is one Monet would use again and again at Argenteuil, for instance in The Seine at Argenteuil. Fifteen years later he returned to Holland for the bulb fields of Tulip Fields in Holland, also in the Orsay.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 1673). Its other Monets are described on Monet at the Musée d'Orsay.