Break for Art | "The Seine at Lavacourt" by Claude Monet

Welcome to Break for Art. My name is Jessie Carillo, Manager of Adult Programs at the Dallas Museum of Art. Today we are going to spend some time looking closely at the Senate Lavacour by the French artist Claude Monet, made in 1880. Take a moment to make this video full screen so you can have an immersive experience with this painting. We will begin by spending one full minute just looking. I want to challenge you to try and keep your focus on looking throughout this minute. As other things come to mind, acknowledge them and then return your focus to this image. Maybe start at the bottom of the canvas and work your way up, or start with the sky and work your way down. Follow the river as it narrows around the bend in the distance. Scan the horizon from the hills at the left to the town on the right. As you look, consider what stands out to you and why. How would you describe the way that looking at this painting makes you feel? Does it remind you of anything that you have seen before, or an experience that you have had in your life? If you need more time to look, feel free to pause here. Monet painted this landscape from his garden looking across the Seine at the town of Lavacour. As Monet did with many of his subjects, he painted this scene multiple times in different seasons and different times of the day to study the effects of different atmospheric conditions. You can find examples of this same scene at sunset and in winter with frost covering the shrub in the middle ground. What season do you think he's capturing here? What do you see that makes you say that? Let's spend some time taking a closer look at some of the formal elements of this painting, its composition, colors, and brushwork. When we looked at this painting for a minute straight, did you notice your focus moving around to different parts of the image? Artists have a lot of tricks for moving your attention around the entire area of a canvas, and one way they do this is the way they compose their scene. This red line represents the horizon line, where the land meets the sky, and it gives us a sense of what the artist is most interested in capturing in their work. In this case, it's almost equally split between land and sky. Knowing that Monet was fascinated by how light and objects are reflected in water, this makes sense to me. By bisecting his canvas, he's not only getting to paint the sky, but also the sky's reflection across the water. If we drew a line down the center of the painting the other way, we would find about the same amount of stuff on each side. One half of the scene has a lot of trees, the other half has the town of Lavocourt. Consider the emotional reaction that you experienced when you were looking at this painting for one minute. How might that change if, say, one side of the canvas was blank and all of the trees and the buildings were on the other side? Would it make you feel more intrigued, anxious, something else? Monet pulls us into this painting by creating a clear foreground, middle ground, and background that draws our eye back toward that horizon line. Let's take a look at them slowly. Here's the foreground, or the things that are closest to us. The middle ground, things that are a little bit far away. And the background, things that are really in the distance. And here's that horizon line that we saw earlier, so our eye gets pulled back farther and farther into this landscape toward that horizon. Notice the amount of detail that Monet has given to each of these sections. As you're focusing on each distinctive layer, are you seeing details you didn't see in your initial pass? For example, I always get hung up on this reflection of the shrub in the foreground. Or check out that tiny steeple that's kind of hidden among the forested hills in the background. Let's talk color. What do you notice about the colors in this painting? Are they warm? Cool? Vibrant? Muted? As I mentioned, Monet was very interested in capturing the qualities of light and how light interacts with surfaces like water, buildings, and plants during different times of day and different seasons of the year. And color is a key part of expressing light. Monet's use of color is also one of the ways that he's able to draw our gaze around the entire landscape. Here are two of the most prominent colors in this painting. Let's follow them throughout the entire composition. Monet uses this lavender periwinkle color throughout the scene, usually for areas of shadow or for the haze of distant areas like the hills in the background. Notice that sometimes he uses a light version of the color and sometimes it's a deeper tone. So starting with this lovely daytime sky up here at 12 o'clock, we see this color in a medium tone. Following it around clockwise, we see a deeper shade in the building's shadows and in their reflections in the gently moving river. Then we see an even deeper shade as the water reflects the deep greens of this large shrub. And finally, this blue is used to express the hazy distance of the poplars and the buildings on the hillside in the background. Same with this kind of vanilla color that he uses in the clouds, then in a more saturated form in the riverbanks and on the sunlit buildings, the reflections of both the sky and the buildings that dapple across the water. So both of these colors are integrated throughout the entire scene. We'll wrap up looking at the brush strokes that Monet used in this painting. Compared to his other paintings, Monet was not as free with how he moved his brush here, instead keeping his brush strokes smaller and closer together, overall just a little more orderly. But these brush strokes are still very expressive because they tell us about the texture and the movement of things like plants and water in this landscape. Let's look at two examples. Notice these small horizontal marks that he uses in this section of the water where the buildings of Lavocourt are reflected. The subtlety and the softness of these marks mimic the way that sunlight and color actually ripple across a slow-moving body of water. Whereas in this section, he uses quick, long, vertical strokes to represent these reeds or blades of grass reaching toward the sun and blowing in the breeze. It kind of looks like his brush may not have been very saturated in paint for this section because the lines are broken by bare spots where the layer beneath is visible. I hope you've enjoyed slowing down and taking a longer look at this painting with me. Did you notice something that you didn't see in your initial look? Thank you for tuning in, and we look forward to seeing you soon at the DMA.