The Seine at Asnières

In March 1875, badly in need of money, Monet joined his fellow painters Berthe Morisot, Renoir and Sisley in auctioning their own paintings at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. The standard catalogue of his work suggests, with a question mark, that this canvas was lot seven. It went for 325 francs, and the buyer on record is either the painter himself or his friend Édouard Manet. Its next owners are easier to trace. By 1928 the picture belonged to Madame Fernand Halphen, a collector in Paris, and during the Second World War it was taken from her. In 1948 the Detroit Institute of Arts bought it in New York, then returned it to her two years later. The surface has changed along the way. Under ultraviolet light, conservators in Cologne found strokes by a later hand in the left foreground and along the right edge, made to imitate his long, dragged brushwork around the moored barges.