The row boat

In the summer of 1887 Monet spent long stretches on the little river Epte, which ran past his new home at Giverny, painting a boat and the young women sitting in it. They were his stepdaughters, Suzanne and Blanche Hoschede, daughters of Alice, the woman who shared his house and would later become his second wife. The two families had merged after the collapse of Alice's first husband's fortune, and by the late 1880s Giverny had become the settled world Monet painted over and over. Here the people are almost an excuse. What holds him is the water, the way the current tugs at the reflections and the hull sits half dissolved in green. The faces are barely given, and the river is painted with far more care.