Artist | Claude Monet (France, 1840 - 1926)

Year | 1881

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

65 × 80.5 cm

Location

The ALBERTINA Museum → Level 2(The Batliner Collection)

View of Vétheuil

Monet lived and worked in Vétheuil, a small village on the Seine northwest of Paris, from 1878 to 1882. Although this period was marked by financial difficulties and the illness and death of his wife Camille, he continued to produce numerous light-filled landscapes of the idyllic river valley using his studio boat and working along the banks. Throughout his life, he pursued "Pleinairmalerei" painting—the spontaneous rendering of nature as a phenomenon of light and colour—and in this work, he captured the atmosphere of a hot summer day and the air glistening in the sunlight with brilliant colours and nervous brushstrokes.

In this particular painting, Monet was primarily interested in the sudden change in colour intensity from nearness to distance. He applied vigorous yellows and greens to the foreground consisting of a ripe grain field and an embankment. For the middle ground, he used a light blue brightened with white to depict the town and its characteristic church tower. The background hills and the sky above are rendered in delicate, blurred pastel hues. This work, painted from a slope south of the village, captures the transition of light and colour across the landscape toward the soft blue summer sky.