Orillas del Sena en Argenteuil

By the time Monet painted this quiet reach of the Seine, he had just come home from sitting out a war. He left for London in 1870 to avoid the fighting between France and Prussia, and returned late in 1871 to a country still raw — beaten in the field, and shaken by the street fighting that had crushed the Paris Commune that spring. He settled at Argenteuil, a river town a short train ride below the capital, close enough that Parisians came out on Sundays to sail and row. He would stay six years and paint this water again and again, in every season and light. Argenteuil was industrialising the whole time he was there, its factories and railway bridge never far from the same river he shows here so calm and unhurried.