Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers

In the summer of 1874, this stretch of the Seine just outside Paris was busy with painters. Monet lived at Argenteuil, on one bank. On the other, at Gennevilliers, Édouard Manet spent July and August at his family's house, and Renoir came out to join them more than once. Monet had fitted out a small boat as a floating studio, and from it he could work in the middle of the river, at the level of the water, among the moored yachts. Petit-Gennevilliers was the bank facing Argenteuil, and its sailing boats became one of his first subjects painted from that boat. Here the masts and their long, broken reflections fill almost the whole canvas, with a few houses and a tall tree on the bank at the left. That same summer Manet painted Monet at work under the awning of the studio boat, with his wife Camille sitting beside him.