Ships in a Harbor

The Museum of Fine Arts notes that this overcast day is painted without the greys you would expect. Monet most likely made the picture in 1873 in the port of Le Havre, the Normandy town where he grew up, and the cloudy light is built from blues, purples, greens and muted pinks. He laid these colours down unmixed, in parallel strokes, and the same strokes do two jobs. On the water they become ripples, and against the sky they make the masts look lit from behind. Strokes set side by side without blending would become one of the marks of his mature style. Monet probably sold the canvas to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, in 1880. By 1893 it was in New York with Erwin Davis, the collector who four years earlier had given the Metropolitan Museum two paintings by Manet, the first works by that painter to enter any museum. In 1897 the Boston collector Denman Ross bought it, and in 1906 he gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts.