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Lot Essay
In the summer of 1901, Claude Monet found himself increasingly frustrated by the stifling heat in his studio at Giverny—writing to Paul Durand-Ruel in July, he explained: “Considering the heat, it is impossible to work... It is a year lost. I long for rain and even the cold, so I can get back to work” (letter to P. Durand Ruel, 19 July 1901; in D. Wildenstein, op. cit., 1985, p. 359). At the time, his gardens at Giverny were due to undergo extensive renovations, preventing him from working en plein air and cutting him off from one of his most reliable sources of motifs. As a result, Monet set out to find inspiration elsewhere, travelling the short distance from his home in Giverny to the village of Lavacourt each afternoon with his wife Alice. This was a place he knew well, having lived and worked in the area between 1878-1881, and soon the artist rented a modest house with a balcony overlooking the Seine from which he could work. Filled with soft passages of delicate brushwork, Vétheuil is one of an important series of fifteen paintings that the artist began during this summer (Wildenstein, nos. 1635-1649), depicting the picturesque village of Vétheuil on the opposite bank of the river from Lavacourt, a familiar motif for the artist, filled with memories.
Even at the outset of the twentieth century, Vétheuil remained an idyllic, agrarian hamlet of only a few hundred inhabitants. Situated 37 miles northwest of Paris, the town overlooks a gentle bend in the river Seine and the romantic Romanesque church of Notre-Dame which occupies a commanding position in the heart of the community. With neither a bridge nor a rail station, and only minimal industry, Vétheuil showed little evidence of the encroaching modernity that had become endemic elsewhere in the region, which was an important draw for the artist. Shortly after settling in the area in 1878, Monet described the town in a letter to Eugène Maurer as “a ravishing spot from which I should be able to extract some things that aren’t bad” (quoted in M. Clarke and R. Thomson, Monet: The Seine and the Sea, 1878-1883, exh. cat., National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003, p. 17). Indeed, over the course of the following three years he moved away from the scenes of contemporary life and leisure that had dominated his work at Argenteuil, and instead began to focus his attention on capturing nature in its most fugitive aspects, inspired by the landscape surrounding Lavacourt and Vétheuil.
The suite of paintings of Vétheuil from 1901 are significant examples of the distinctive serial approach Monet had developed in the intervening years, in which virtually identical views of his chosen motif vary only in their lighting effects and weather conditions. The Vétheuil pictures reveal the same fascination with the evanescent aspects of nature that characterize such celebrated late series as those Monet painted of the garden at Giverny, the Gothic cathedral at Rouen, and of the Thames River in London. Positioning himself by the open window of his rented accommodation, which offered a perfect view of the Seine and the town on the opposite banks, he studied the ways in which the idyllic countryside was altered by the transitory effects of light. In some paintings, Monet rendered Vétheuil in the bright sunshine of early morning, in others the rosy glow of sunset casts the village in a haze of soft pastel hues, or the deepening shadows of dusk, while a handful of pictures include overcast skies that suggest oncoming showers.
Across the series—all of which were executed from precisely the same viewpoint, on canvases that were either square, or nearly square, in format—Monet placed the cluster of buildings that make up Vétheuil in the upper third of the canvas, with the larger lower section given over to the rippling water of the Seine and its myriad reflections. The church of Notre-Dame forms the focal point of the pyramidal composition, its bell tower rising proudly and protectively over the quaint whitewashed houses. In the present work Monet adopts a particularly free, spontaneous handling of paint, his strokes of pigment drawn lightly across the surface, while areas of the natural canvas are deliberately left exposed towards the edges of the composition, suggesting the confidence and speed with which he worked before his motif. The soft brushwork and subtle color transitions blur the boundaries between different elements within the scene, such as the shoreline and the river, the chalk hills and the sky, while the surface of the water and its dynamic play of reflections is captured in a delicate pattern of short, horizontal strokes that convey a vivid impression of the gently flowing movement of the river.
Of the fifteen canvases within the Vétheuil series, seven are now housed in important international museum collections, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (Wildenstein, no. 1644), The Art Institute of Chicago (Wildenstein, nos. 1643 and 1645), the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Wildenstein, no. 1646), and The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Wildenstein, no. 1648). The present work remained in Monet’s personal collection until his death in 1926, before passing to his son Michel.
Even at the outset of the twentieth century, Vétheuil remained an idyllic, agrarian hamlet of only a few hundred inhabitants. Situated 37 miles northwest of Paris, the town overlooks a gentle bend in the river Seine and the romantic Romanesque church of Notre-Dame which occupies a commanding position in the heart of the community. With neither a bridge nor a rail station, and only minimal industry, Vétheuil showed little evidence of the encroaching modernity that had become endemic elsewhere in the region, which was an important draw for the artist. Shortly after settling in the area in 1878, Monet described the town in a letter to Eugène Maurer as “a ravishing spot from which I should be able to extract some things that aren’t bad” (quoted in M. Clarke and R. Thomson, Monet: The Seine and the Sea, 1878-1883, exh. cat., National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003, p. 17). Indeed, over the course of the following three years he moved away from the scenes of contemporary life and leisure that had dominated his work at Argenteuil, and instead began to focus his attention on capturing nature in its most fugitive aspects, inspired by the landscape surrounding Lavacourt and Vétheuil.
The suite of paintings of Vétheuil from 1901 are significant examples of the distinctive serial approach Monet had developed in the intervening years, in which virtually identical views of his chosen motif vary only in their lighting effects and weather conditions. The Vétheuil pictures reveal the same fascination with the evanescent aspects of nature that characterize such celebrated late series as those Monet painted of the garden at Giverny, the Gothic cathedral at Rouen, and of the Thames River in London. Positioning himself by the open window of his rented accommodation, which offered a perfect view of the Seine and the town on the opposite banks, he studied the ways in which the idyllic countryside was altered by the transitory effects of light. In some paintings, Monet rendered Vétheuil in the bright sunshine of early morning, in others the rosy glow of sunset casts the village in a haze of soft pastel hues, or the deepening shadows of dusk, while a handful of pictures include overcast skies that suggest oncoming showers.
Across the series—all of which were executed from precisely the same viewpoint, on canvases that were either square, or nearly square, in format—Monet placed the cluster of buildings that make up Vétheuil in the upper third of the canvas, with the larger lower section given over to the rippling water of the Seine and its myriad reflections. The church of Notre-Dame forms the focal point of the pyramidal composition, its bell tower rising proudly and protectively over the quaint whitewashed houses. In the present work Monet adopts a particularly free, spontaneous handling of paint, his strokes of pigment drawn lightly across the surface, while areas of the natural canvas are deliberately left exposed towards the edges of the composition, suggesting the confidence and speed with which he worked before his motif. The soft brushwork and subtle color transitions blur the boundaries between different elements within the scene, such as the shoreline and the river, the chalk hills and the sky, while the surface of the water and its dynamic play of reflections is captured in a delicate pattern of short, horizontal strokes that convey a vivid impression of the gently flowing movement of the river.
Of the fifteen canvases within the Vétheuil series, seven are now housed in important international museum collections, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (Wildenstein, no. 1644), The Art Institute of Chicago (Wildenstein, nos. 1643 and 1645), the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Wildenstein, no. 1646), and The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Wildenstein, no. 1648). The present work remained in Monet’s personal collection until his death in 1926, before passing to his son Michel.