The Studio Boat

By 1874 Monet had a habit that puzzled his neighbours at Argenteuil, the small town on the Seine just outside Paris where he was then living. He had bought a small boat, built a plank cabin on it barely wide enough for an easel, and rowed out to paint the river from the middle of the river. The idea was not his own. He had taken it from Charles-François Daubigny, an older landscape painter who kept a floating studio of the same kind. What it gave Monet was a view no one on the bank could reach, the water and its reflections seen at their own level, shifting with the light and the wind. This painting is of that boat, the dark cabin moored by the shore and its reflection breaking up in the current. That same summer his friend Édouard Manet set up nearby and painted Monet at work in it, with his wife Camille seated in the little cabin behind him.