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拍品專文
The present painting is part of an important series that Monet made depicting the Seine at Vétheuil, a picturesque village where he lived and worked between 1878 and 1881. The years that Monet spent at Vétheuil represent a watershed in his career - "a decisive moment of personal and artistic reassessment" and "the most momentous change in the career of the most revolutionary Impressionist" (C. Stuckey et al., Monet at Vétheuil: The Turning Point, exh. cat., University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 1998, pp. 13 and 41). Following his move to Vétheuil, Monet entirely abandoned the contemporary themes that had dominated his earlier oeuvre and began to focus instead on the depiction of fugitive aspects of nature, employing a nascent serial technique that laid the groundwork for his most important later production. With their sensitive description of the changing effects of light on water, the views of the Seine at Vétheuil indeed presage the last great series of Monet's career: the waterlilies at Giverny.
At the time that Monet moved to Vétheuil, it was an idyllic, agrarian hamlet of just a few hundred inhabitants. About sixty kilometers northwest of Paris, the town was splendidly situated on a hill overlooking a gentle bend in the Seine. Its major landmark was the twelfth-century church of Notre-Dame, which occupied a commanding position in the heart of the village. With neither bridges nor rail station and only minimal industry, Vétheuil showed little evidence of modernity, which was making major inroads at the time elsewhere in the vicinity of Paris. Shortly after settling at Vétheuil in 1878, the artist 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, op. cit., p. 17).
The present picture is one of six that Monet made during the flooding of the Seine at Vétheuil in the first two months of 1881 (W. 638-643). It was painted from the artist's bâteau atelier, a partially covered boat that he had outfitted for use as a studio. To paint the present scene, Monet anchored the craft northwest of Vétheuil, facing upstream toward the town. The left side of the canvas shows the bank of the Seine, lined with leafless poplars; on the right lay the Île de Bouche, one of several slender spits of land that divide this stretch of the river. The two land masses frame the light-dappled water that spills into the foreground, its rippled surface reflecting the dense cumulus clouds and slate-blue sky. In the distance stand the clock tower of the church of Notre-Dame and the twin turrets of the neo-Renaissance villa "Les Tourelles," flanked on either side by clusters of quaint, whitewashed houses. The level of the river was several meters higher than normal for this time of year and the Île de Bouche is partially submerged, suggesting that the canvas was painted in mid-February, when the flooding of the Seine reached its zenith.
At the time that Monet moved to Vétheuil, it was an idyllic, agrarian hamlet of just a few hundred inhabitants. About sixty kilometers northwest of Paris, the town was splendidly situated on a hill overlooking a gentle bend in the Seine. Its major landmark was the twelfth-century church of Notre-Dame, which occupied a commanding position in the heart of the village. With neither bridges nor rail station and only minimal industry, Vétheuil showed little evidence of modernity, which was making major inroads at the time elsewhere in the vicinity of Paris. Shortly after settling at Vétheuil in 1878, the artist 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, op. cit., p. 17).
The present picture is one of six that Monet made during the flooding of the Seine at Vétheuil in the first two months of 1881 (W. 638-643). It was painted from the artist's bâteau atelier, a partially covered boat that he had outfitted for use as a studio. To paint the present scene, Monet anchored the craft northwest of Vétheuil, facing upstream toward the town. The left side of the canvas shows the bank of the Seine, lined with leafless poplars; on the right lay the Île de Bouche, one of several slender spits of land that divide this stretch of the river. The two land masses frame the light-dappled water that spills into the foreground, its rippled surface reflecting the dense cumulus clouds and slate-blue sky. In the distance stand the clock tower of the church of Notre-Dame and the twin turrets of the neo-Renaissance villa "Les Tourelles," flanked on either side by clusters of quaint, whitewashed houses. The level of the river was several meters higher than normal for this time of year and the Île de Bouche is partially submerged, suggesting that the canvas was painted in mid-February, when the flooding of the Seine reached its zenith.