The Bridge at Argenteuil

1874

Claude Monet

Artist, French, 1840 - 1926

Two sailboats and a rowboat float on a glistening, azure-blue river spanned by a stone bridge to our right in this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted with visible strokes and dashes throughout so some details are indistinct. An area of asparagus and moss-green dabs creates a patch of grassy riverbank in the lower right corner of the painting. The rippling, sun-dappled surface of the river is created with short parallel strokes of pale pink, caramel brown, white, sage green, and light blue. An empty sailboat, with its sails tightly furled or removed all together, floats near us to our left of center. It has a single tall, pale wood mast. A similar pole rises from the bottom edge of the picture, presumably the mast of another ship below us or out of our view. Farther out on the water and to our left is another sailboat with full white sails catching the sunlight. The final vessel is loosely painted with a few swipes of goldenrod yellow, black, white, and pink to suggest two people sitting in a rowboat, one of them holding a pink parasol. The gray stone bridge is shaded on our side with denim blue along the faces of the four arches we can see. Several people, painted with a few touches of peach and black, stand at the railing. The bridge angles from near the upper right corner of the canvas to almost the middle of the composition, where it meets a narrow, three-story coral-pink and light gray building. A two-story, white building sits a short distance to its left. They bask in warm sunlight against a row of emerald and olive-green trees. A baby-blue sky scattered with puffy white clouds spans the upper half of the composition. The artist signed the lower right with dark red letters, “Claude Monet.”

Media Options

This object’s media is free and in the public domain. Read our full Open Access policy for images.

From a distance of ten feet or so, Monet's brushstrokes blend to yield a convincing view of the Seine and the pleasure boats that drew tourists to Argenteuil. Up close, however, each dab of paint is distinct, and the scene dissolves into a mosaic of paint—brilliant, unblended tones of blue, red, green, yellow. In the water, quick, fluid skips of the brush mimic the lapping surface. In the trees, thicker paint is applied with denser, stubbier strokes. The figure in the sailboat is only a ghostly wash of dusty blue, the women rowing nearby are indicated by mere shorthand.

In the early years of impressionism, Monet, Renoir, and others strove to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere on the landscape and to transcribe directly and quickly their sensory experience of it. Monet advised the American artist Lilla Cabot Perry, "When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you."

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 85


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

  • Dimensions

    overall: 60 x 79.7 cm (23 5/8 x 31 3/8 in.)
    framed: 78.1 x 97.8 x 4.7 cm (30 3/4 x 38 1/2 x 1 7/8 in.)

  • Accession

    1983.1.24


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(Durand-Ruel, Paris); sold 1890 to Henri Vever [1854-1942], Paris; (his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1-2 February 1897, no. 78); purchased by (Georges Petit) for Marie-Albert, vicomte de Curel [1827-1908], Paris;[1] by descent in his family; (de Curel sale, Palais Galliera, Paris, 21 June 1961, lot C);[2] purchased by (Hector Brame, Paris) for Mr. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia; gift 1983 to NGA.
[1] See reports of the Vever sale published in the Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot no. 35-36, 4-5 February 1897 and the Chroniques des Arts et de la Curiosité, as well as the annotated sale catalogue, copies in NGA curatorial files. The NGA picture was not included in the 25 November 1918 Curel estate sale held at the Galerie Georges Petit (originally scheduled for 3 May 1918). The vicomte de Curel, for whom the painting was purchased, has been identified by François Auffret, Président of La Société des Amis de Jongkind in Paris (founded 1970), with confirmation from the collector's descendants. With M. Auffret's kind permission, his research was shared with the NGA by Dr. Diana Kostyrko (see her e-mails from October through December 2008 in NGA curatorial files).
[2] According to press coverage of the 1961 sale, the picture had been in the collection of Barbara Church, an American collector who lived in Ville-d'Avray and had died the preceding year. However, the sale in which the NGA painting figured actually consisted of six pictures from the de Curel collection; the Barbara Church sale, held the same day at the Palais Galliera, was one of several estate sales of the Church collection held in 1961.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1966

  • French Paintings from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon and Mrs. Mellon Bruce, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1966, no. 83, repro.

1986

  • Gifts to the Nation: Selected Acquisitions from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, July-October 1986, unnumbered checklist, repro.

  • Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad; State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, January-May 1986, no. 19, repro.

1995

  • Claude Monet: 1840-1926, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995, no. 37, repro., as The Highway Bridge at Argenteuil.

1996

  • Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party", The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1996-1997, pl. 31, repro.

1999

  • An Enduring Legacy: Masterpieces from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1999-2000, no cat.

2000

  • The Impressionists at Argenteuil, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 2000, no. 28, repro., as The Highway Bridge and Boat Basin.

2014

  • Monet and the Seine: Impressions of a River, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2014-2015, no. 12, repro. (shown only in Houston).

2015

  • Monet: A Bridge to Modernity, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2015-2016.

2017

  • Impressionismus: Die Kunst der Landschaft, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, 2017, no. 32, repro.

  • Monet: Framing Life, Detroit Institute of Arts, 2017-2018, no. 4.

Bibliography

1966

  • Goldwater, Robert. "The Glory that was France." Art News 65 (March 1966): 86, repro. 45.

1974

  • Wildenstein, Daniel. Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné. 5 vols. Lausanne and Paris, 1974-1991: no. 312.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 487, no. 719, color repro.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 281, repro.

1991

  • Kopper, Philip. America's National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation. New York, 1991: 277, 279, color repro.

1996

  • Wildenstein, Daniel. Monet [vol. 1: The Triumph of Impressionism; vols. 2-4: Catalogue raisonné - Werkverzeichnis]. 4 vols. Cologne and Paris, 1996: 2:132, no. 312, repro.

1997

  • Kelder, Diane. The Great Book of French Impressionism, 1997, no. 127, repro.

2000

  • Tucker, Paul Hayes. The Impressionists at Argenteuil. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. Washington and Hartford, 2000: no. 28.

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 387, no. 321, color repro.

2012

  • Trescott, Jacqueline. “Making an Even Better Impression.” Washington Post 135, no. 146 (April 29, 2012): E6, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: Claude Monet

Wikidata ID

Q20188770


You may be interested in

Loading Results