Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat

Monet painted this in 1874, the same year he and his friends hung their work in a Paris photographer's studio and a critic, sneering at one of Monet's canvases, coined the word "Impressionist." By then Monet was living at Argenteuil, a town on the Seine just outside Paris where Parisians came on Sundays to sail and picnic. Two years earlier he had fitted out a small boat as a floating studio, and from the water he could paint the river itself, the light on it, the sails. Here it is autumn, the basin nearly empty, a single boat left on the water. The broken dabs of colour are less about detail than about the flicker of light he was chasing.