Regate ad Argenteuil

Around 1872 Monet was living at Argenteuil, a town on the Seine just downstream of Paris where the river widened into the broadest basin in the region. Boats had raced there since the 1850s, and on weekends the water filled with sails and day-trippers out from the city. Monet painted the moored boats along the bank rather than the race itself, and half the canvas is given over to their reflection. The upper half is the boats, houses and trees. The lower half is the same shapes broken into broad, loose bands of colour on the moving water, laid on so freely that the reflection is almost its own painting. The collector Gustave Caillebotte, a fellow painter and friend, owned it and left it to the French state in 1894, which is how it reached the Musée d'Orsay.