Path on the Island of Saint Martin, Vétheuil

Monet spent three years at Vétheuil, a village on the Seine downstream from Paris, and they were the poorest of his life. In 1881 that began to lift. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who had stopped buying through a long slump, started taking his canvases again in quantity, and Monet worked through that summer on the island of Saint Martin, a strip of land in the river just south of the village that he reached by boat.

The path here runs toward the town. Vétheuil stood on a steep bank under the tower of its 12th-century church, and that silhouette is the motif he painted over and over in those years. In December he packed up the household and moved to Poissy. He came back 20 years later for a few weeks and painted the village again, this time from the far bank of the river.