Les barques. Régates à Argenteuil

Around 1874 the Seine at Argenteuil doubled as a racecourse. Sailing clubs from Paris held their regattas on the wide stretch of river by the town, and Monet, who lived there, painted the yachts strung out across the water under a grey, broken sky, their white sails catching what light there was. Nearer to us a small rowing boat sits low in the water, and a few red-roofed houses line the far bank. The canvas found its first owner a few years later. Ernest May, a Paris banker who had been buying the Impressionists cheaply since the mid-1870s, perhaps took it straight from Monet in April 1878. Degas painted May at the stock exchange around the same time, and that picture is in the Orsay as well. This one arrived through Count Isaac de Camondo, who bought it in 1893 and left it to the Louvre in 1911.