Why is Monet's river scene important to modern landscape painting. - National Gallery

Hello, my name is Chiara Di Stefano and I'm Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery. Today, I'd like to talk about this picture made in 1872 by the French artist Claude Monet. Its title, The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil, situates the scene in a very specific place. In French, Petit Bras means little arm, and this was the name given to a small stretch of water separated by the river Seine by a tiny island called the Ile Maronte, which you can see here to the right of the composition. We're in the countryside near Argenteuil, a small town on the outskirts of Paris where Monet was living at the time. Today, we tend to associate Monet with Giverny, the village in northern France where he lived from 1883 to his death in 1926, and where he cultivated his flower and water gardens and painted his famous water lilies. And yet, well before Giverny, Argenteuil played a crucial role not only in Monet's art, but also in the very origins of Impressionism. But first, let's take a moment to look at this painting. In the foreground, to the left, we see the east bank of the river with several patchy areas of soil and grass. These are rendered through a rich palette of browns, greens, yellows, and perhaps more surprisingly, pinks and purples with some touches of red. In the center of the composition, the river is placidly flowing by. Throughout his life, Monet was obsessed with capturing the fleeting effects of light on the surface of the water. And while this is particularly clear in his later water lily paintings, even in this early work, we can see the way he revels in exploring the reflective qualities of the water. Look, for example, at the different types of brushstrokes with which he renders the reflections of the poplar trees. In this area, he uses large, flat brushstrokes, applying the paint slowly in a single straight line. But elsewhere, he depicts the mirror image of the trees much more rapidly and loosely with just some quick zigzag marks. To the right, across the river, a line of poplars recedes into the distance, guiding our eye towards the horizon. They partially cover a house, a small villa, which is the only trace of human presence beside the two sketchy figures on the opposite riverbank. The overcast sky occupies two thirds of the composition. And to convey the misty atmosphere of a winter day, Monet adopts a muted palette of pale greys, yellows, and mauves, which gives the painting this overall blonde and light tonality. With this impression of stillness on a hushed winter day, Monet focuses on the timeless quality of the natural world. This could be a riverbank today or centuries ago, but we know it's 1872, probably January or February. And Monet, who was then in his early thirties, had just moved to Argenteuil with his wife and their young five-year-old son. Before then, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in September 1870, they had taken refuge first here in London and then in Holland. And after a year of personal crisis, nomadic living, and financial insecurity, in Argenteuil, Monet finally found the stability he had been longing for. Argenteuil itself was a pretty suburban town along the River Seine, to the northwest of Paris, more or less a 15-minute train ride from Gare Saint-Lazare, a station that Monet had often depicted. During the second half of the 19th century, Argenteuil became a popular weekend destination renowned for pleasure boating. Monet would spend six of his most productive years there, painting some 250 pictures. Beside this work, the National Gallery holds another of Monet's views of Argenteuil and its surroundings. Made in 1875, it is the largest of the 18 snowy scenes that he depicted during the chilly winter. Monet often worked in the open air alongside fellow artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Gustave Caillebotte. And Argenteuil played a crucial role in the early phase of Impressionism and became a key place of experimentation in modern landscape painting. During Monet's lifetime, landscape painting rose in prestige, taking the place of history painting both in the official salons, ruled by the conservative and traditional Academy of Fine Arts, and in the art market. A picture like Le Petit Bras d'Argenteuil, less sketchy and more finished than most of Monet's works from those years, would have been quite easy to sell and may have been painted with a specific client in mind. From early on, Monet was very aware of the new status of landscapes as a fashionable genre. When he was only 16 years old, he started working en plein air on the Normandy coast with the marine painter Eugène Boudin, who would become his first unofficial teacher. If I have become a painter, Monet would say later in life, I owe it to Boudin. And later on, he recalled, From Boudin, Monet learned to convey an authentic experience of nature. One of the ways to achieve this was to move away from both the historical landscapes and the picturesque tradition, which were then very much in vogue. And as a reaction to artificially composed landscapes on view at the traditional salons, Monet chose to celebrate the beauty of nature through its everyday and, on first glance, uninspiring scenes. It may be difficult to grasp it today, but for 19th century viewers, this was indeed an entirely new way of looking at the world. So let's look again at our picture. There is nothing special about this specific subject matter. This is just a quiet river view captured on an uneventful, overcast day. And yet, there is poetry in it. This direct, unfiltered experience of the natural world was to become one of Monet's lifelong preoccupations. As he would later say, The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.