Morning on the Seine, near Giverny

Monet dated this canvas 96, which places it in the first summer of the series, and that summer did not go to plan. He had started painting the river at dawn near his house at Giverny, close to where the little Epte runs into the Seine, and bad weather kept spoiling the mornings. He put the canvases aside and took them up again in the summer of 1897, and the group grew to 21. The Museum of Fine Arts speaks of grisaille effects in the morning mist, painting built almost entirely out of greys, with trees half visible in the dawn light and reflections glimmering on the water, and it calls these arguably the most subtle pictures Monet ever made. In June 1898 he showed 15 of the series together at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. That November he sold this one to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, whose New York branch carried it across the Atlantic, and in 1907 it found a buyer in Boston.