Monet at Vétheuil: Paintings of Grief, Ice and Summer, 1878–81

Monet at Vétheuil covers the years 1878 to 1881, when Claude Monet lived in this small village on the Seine, about sixty kilometers downstream from Paris. Here he painted the river and the village church in every season, the ice floes of the extraordinary winter of 1879–80, poppy fields and sunflowers, and the portrait of his wife Camille on her deathbed in September 1879.

Vétheuil was the hardest period of his life and a turning point in his art. He arrived broke, sharing a rented house with the family of his bankrupt patron Ernest Hoschedé, and left at the end of 1881 having moved away from the group painting of Impressionism toward the solitary, serial way of working that led to Giverny. The paintings below, strongest first, trace those years in the Monet archive.

Arriving at Vétheuil (1878)

By 1878 the Argenteuil years were over. Monet was deep in debt, Camille was ill after the birth of their second son, Michel, in March, and the Paris market for Impressionist pictures had collapsed. In late summer the family moved to Vétheuil, a village on a bend of the Seine between Mantes and Vernon, where rents were low. They were joined by Alice Hoschedé and her six children. Her husband Ernest, a department-store magnate and one of Monet's early collectors, had gone bankrupt, and his collection, including Monet canvases, had been sold at auction for very little.

The two families shared a rented house at the edge of the village, with a garden that ran down toward the river. Ernest was mostly absent in Paris. Alice nursed Camille and ran a household of twelve. It is the background to almost everything Monet painted here: a crowded home, unpaid bills, and the river as the one place he could be alone.

The village and the river

Vétheuil's twelfth-century church sits on a rise above the houses, and Monet painted it from every angle. In The Church in Vétheuil in Winter (1878–79, Musée d'Orsay) its tower stands above snow-covered roofs and bare trees, the whole scene in cold whites, grays and blues. Vétheuil Church (1879, Musée d'Orsay) shows it closer and more solid.

His favorite view was from across the river, at the hamlet of Lavacourt on the opposite bank, or from his floating studio boat. In Vétheuil in Summer (1880, Metropolitan Museum of Art) the village lines the far bank, its church tower and houses doubled in the shimmering river, which takes up the lower half of the canvas. Here Monet's brush moves in short horizontal dashes, the reflections built from the same colors as the buildings, broken by flecks of sky blue. View of Vétheuil (1880, Metropolitan Museum of Art) turns the other way: a summer meadow full of red poppies, poplars and the church tower in the distance.

Further from the river, he painted the orchards and lanes around the village: Plum Trees in Bloom (1879, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), the snowy and muddy roads of Road into Vétheuil in Winter (Gothenburg) and Road to Vétheuil, Snow Effect (St. Petersburg, Florida), and the poppy fields that recur all summer.

Camille's death (September 1879)

Camille Monet died at Vétheuil on 5 September 1879, aged thirty-two, probably of cancer of the uterus, though the cause is not certain. Monet painted her on her deathbed. In Camille Monet on Her Deathbed (Musée d'Orsay) her face is barely there, half lost under a veil and flowers, swept over by strokes of blue, gray and violet.

Years later he told his friend Georges Clemenceau that he had caught himself, at her bedside, analyzing the changing colors of death on her face, and was horrified by his own reflex. The picture is not a portrait in any conventional sense. It is the record of a painter's eye working on the one subject it should have looked away from.

The great freeze and the breakup of the ice (1879–80)

The winter after Camille's death was the coldest in France in living memory. In December 1879 the Seine froze solid. In the first days of January 1880 a thaw set in, and the ice broke up with a noise that woke the village at night. For weeks huge floes drifted downstream past Vétheuil, piling up against the banks.

Monet painted the event over and over, often from the same place, at dawn, under gray skies and at sunset. The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt (1880, private collection) shows the floes as slabs of white and blue across the river, with the snowy village on the far bank. In Sunset on the Seine in Winter (1880, Pola Museum of Art) a red sun sinks into the mist above floating ice, an image that recalls Impression, Sunrise eight years earlier, but colder and more desolate. The Breaking up near Vétheuil (Louvre, Department of Paintings) and Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, in Winter (Petit Palais, Paris) belong to the same campaign.

These ice pictures are often read as mourning pictures: a dead landscape, frozen and then breaking apart, painted in the months after a death. Monet never said so. But the coincidence of grief and subject is hard to set aside, and the series is one of the first in which he painted one motif many times under changing conditions, the method that would define his later career.

The 1880 Salon and a change of course

In 1880 Monet broke with his friends. Instead of showing at the fifth Impressionist exhibition, he submitted two large pictures to the official Salon. The jury accepted a view of Lavacourt and rejected The Ice Floes.

Degas and others saw the move as a betrayal. Monet's reason was money: the Salon still made reputations and sales. That June the publisher Georges Charpentier gave him a one-man show at the gallery of his magazine La Vie moderne, and from then on Monet's career moved toward solo exhibitions with dealers, especially Durand-Ruel, rather than group shows.

The last summers: gardens and flowers (1880–81)

Life eased a little in the last two years. Monet painted Alice's and his children in the garden, the river in summer and great vases of flowers. The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil (1881, National Gallery of Art, Washington) shows tall sunflowers lining the steps of the house, with a small boy on the path, probably Michel, and blue-and-white pots. Bouquet of Sunflowers (1881, Metropolitan Museum of Art) brings the same flowers indoors, a heavy, glowing still life. Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers (1880, National Gallery of Art) and Woman Seated under the Willows (1880) belong to the same seasons.

In December 1881 Monet moved with Alice and the children to Poissy, and in April 1883 to Giverny, a few miles up the Seine. He came back to Vétheuil as a motif in 1901, painting the village from Lavacourt again in a group of luminous canvases, two of which are in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Why Vétheuil matters

Before Vétheuil, Monet's pictures were mostly about modern leisure: regattas, promenades, people in gardens. At Vétheuil the figures thin out and the subject becomes the landscape itself, its seasons and weather, painted repeatedly. The paintings after 1880, at Étretat and the Normandy coast and then at Giverny, grow directly from what he learned here.