Claude Monet at Argenteuil: Regattas, Bridges and the Birth of Impressionism

A woman in white with a parasol stands on a grassy riverbank, a small boy a few steps ahead of her. Beyond them the Seine runs wide and pale, and across it, on smooth stone piers, a train is crossing a long iron bridge. Clouds tumble over everything. This is The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, painted by Claude Monet in 1874, and the walkers are almost certainly his wife Camille and their son Jean. It comes from the seven years when Monet and his friends were working out what Impressionism would be.

A new start after the war

Monet married Camille Doncieux in June 1870, just before the Franco-Prussian War broke out. To avoid conscription the family spent the war years in London and the Netherlands. In London he met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his most important dealer.

In 1871 the Monets came back to France and settled in Argenteuil, a small town on the Seine about twelve kilometres northwest of Paris. Parisians came out by train to walk, row and sail. Monet rented a house there, and in 1874 he moved into a newly built one he described as a "rose-colored house with green shutters." Thanks to an inheritance from his father and better sales, by 1872 the household could afford two servants and a gardener.

Sails on the river

The river was the reason to be there. Argenteuil was one of the great sailing centres near Paris, and Monet painted its boats again and again. Regattas at Argenteuil, from about 1872, shows a cluster of white sails leaning together, with red-roofed houses and green trees on the bank. The reflections are quick, broken strokes of white, blue and orange. The painting later belonged to Gustave Caillebotte, a fellow painter who bought his first Monet in 1875 and helped him through hard times, and Caillebotte left it to the French state in 1894. It now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

To get closer to his subjects, Monet bought a boat soon after moving to Argenteuil and turned it into a floating studio. He called it "a cabin made out of planks where I had just enough room to set up my easel," and he probably based the idea on the studio boat of the older landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny. From the water he could paint views no one on the bank could see. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta suggests that Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil (1873) was painted from that boat. Golden trees frame a calm stretch of river with the Château Michelet in the distance, and the reflections are so even it is hard to tell where the trees end and the water begins.

Bridges, trains and a new kind of subject

Argenteuil was not only a pleasure ground. It had factories, a busy road bridge and a railway bridge carrying trains in and out of Paris, and Monet painted those too. That was a quiet act of rebellion: the academic tradition did not consider railways and iron bridges fit subjects for serious art. In The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874), now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the stone arches of the road bridge run in from the right, sailboats rest on bright blue water, and a couple of figures in a rowboat are suggested with a few touches of yellow and pink. The museum points out that from about ten feet away the strokes blend into a convincing view, but up close the scene breaks into a mosaic of unblended colour.

The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge belongs to the same year. The Saint Louis Art Museum, which owns it, notes that the light grey ground of the canvas shows through across much of the surface, a sign of how quickly and freely Monet worked.

1874, the year it got a name

That spring Monet and a group of like-minded artists, among them Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, staged their own exhibition in Paris, independent of the official Salon. Monet showed Impression, Sunrise, and a hostile critic, Louis Leroy, used its title to mock the whole group as "Impressionists." The name stuck.

Much of what made the movement was being worked out at Argenteuil. Renoir, Manet and Sisley all came to paint with Monet there. Renoir painted him at his easel in the garden in 1873, and Manet painted him at work on his studio boat in 1874. Monet had already been painting side by side with Renoir in 1869 at La Grenouillère, a bathing spot further down the Seine, and Argenteuil gave that experiment room to grow. In all, Monet produced at least 150 pictures of the town and its surroundings, which is why it has been called "the single most important site for the birth of Impressionism."

Leaving Argenteuil

The good years did not last. Money grew tight again, Camille fell seriously ill in 1876, and after their second son, Michel, was born in 1878, her health got worse. That autumn the family left Argenteuil for the village of Vétheuil, further down the Seine. Camille died the following year. His Argenteuil house opened as a Monet museum in 2022.

You can find all of the paintings above, and many more, in our Claude Monet collection.