La barca blu

By 1887 Monet had settled at Giverny, and the river Epte that ran near his house kept turning up in his work. That summer he painted a group of pictures of the household's young people out in a small boat on the water, drifting among the reeds. Here two of them sit in the blue skiff that gives the painting its name, their figures loosely brushed and half dissolved into the reflections around them. Monet was less interested in who they were than in the way the light broke on the moving surface, and in the way the boat's colour answered the greens of the bank. He worked these river scenes outdoors, returning to the same spot as the afternoon changed the water.