The Ironies of Beauty Claude Monet’s The Seine at Lavacourt
paul hayes tucker
Claude Monet’s stunning view of the Seine at Lavacourt (figs. 48 and 49) is one of the largest, most visually accommodating paintings that the artist produced during the second decade of his career. It is rendered with a keen eye to telling detail — the spray of river grass in the immediate foreground, for example — and with what appears to be deep feeling for this stretch of France’s national river near the house Monet was renting in rural Vétheuil, approximately thirtyseven miles north of Paris. Its light is crystalline and utterly charming, its palette of soft earth colors and sky blues as gentle as the spring air that fills the scene, its facture lovingly controlled, its spatial range breathtaking and bountiful. How then could it have almost ruptured the group of artists who called themselves impressionists? This is a story of intrigue and backbiting, manipulation of the press and shortages of money, risk taking and self-preservation. It sounds like a tabloid tale more fitting for our own times, but it is rooted in the complex history of impressionism and what it meant to be an avant-garde artist in the years following France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. It also is grounded in the personal challenges Monet faced at the end of that decade and the difficult decisions he had to make at a time of professional crisis. One thing is certain and often reiterated: The Seine at Lavacourt ranks among Monet’s most important early works. Part of its significance lies in its extraordinary handling. Every mark of the brush seems deliberate, especially those describing the Seine. Note how Monet painstakingly sets down white highlights atop carefully arranged shades of blue, the latter subtly suggesting the depths of the water, the former indicating the flowing, sun-dappled surface with its multiple reflections of sky and land (fig. 50). The touches of white are strongly differentiated and quite varied but are all approximately the same consistency of impasto. They also tend to move horizontally across the canvas, and they regularly diminish in size from the foreground to the background, contributing to the impressive unity of the scene. The river grasses in the immediate foreground, like the larger grasses in the middle ground, provide telling contrasts of color, touch, and movement. Darker than the waters, they shoot up from the bottom of the canvas in rapid succession, like staccato notes in a musical score. The bulkier bush in the middle ground is denser but conversely lighter in tone, its greens as varied as the descriptive marks of Monet’s versatile brush. It comprises competing
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opposite figure 48 Claude Monet, The Seine at Lavacourt, 1880 Detail of figure 49