Zaandam

On 2 June 1871, days after the Paris Commune had been put down in a week of street fighting, Monet arrived in Zaandam, a mill town on the river Zaan north of Amsterdam. He had sat out the war in London, and that same day he wrote to his friend the painter Camille Pissarro that there was enough to paint here for a lifetime. This canvas is one of the quiet waterfronts he found. Tall trees lean over a row of wooden houses painted green, with red roofs, a church spire rises far off under a sky heaped with cloud, and the water is laid in with short, level strokes. In London Monet had met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who probably bought this picture from him around 1872. The painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton gave it to the French state in 1906.