Paisaje. El Sena en Asnières

Monet painted this stretch of the Seine at Asnieres in 1873, just months after the little harbour sketch he called Impression, Sunrise, the picture that would soon give Impressionism its name. Asnieres was a modest place just downriver from Paris, recently joined to the city by rail and starting to fill with workers' houses and small industry. Monet leaves most of that out and gives us the quiet part: barges moored in flat late-afternoon light, trees on the far bank, the water barely moving. The canvas has a strange later history. It was taken from a German private collection by the Soviet army after 1945 as war reparations, and stayed out of public view in the Hermitage until 1995.