Carrières-Saint-Denis

In 1872 Monet was living downriver at Argenteuil, a short train ride from Paris, and he took to working from a small boat he had fitted out as a floating studio. This view of Carrières-Saint-Denis — a village on the Seine now called Carrières-sur-Seine — comes straight from that habit of painting on the water, looking back at the bank. He was 32, and the loose, quick handling here belongs to the very first years of what would soon be called Impressionism, with the group's debut show still two years off. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought the canvas early, and it later passed to the collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, who gave it to France in 1906.