The Coalmen

Paris in the mid-1870s ran on coal, and most of it came in by barge. This is the Seine just downstream of the city, between Asnières and Clichy, where the banks were filling with factories and gasworks. Monet was living at Argenteuil and took the train into Paris across the river near here, so the view belonged to his commute. The men cross to the barges on narrow planks with baskets on their shoulders, worked down to silhouettes. The palette is grey and ochre, nearer coal dust than the bright water he usually painted, and labourers appear almost nowhere else in his work. It is a small canvas, about 55 by 66 centimetres, and it stayed in private hands until 1993, when it passed to the French state and entered the Musée d'Orsay.