On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
1868
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 81.5 × 100.7 cm (32 1/16 × 39 5/8 in.); Framed: 98.5 × 117.8 × 8 cm (38 3/4 × 46 3/8 × 3 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Potter Palmer Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Here Claude Monet’s future wife, Camille Doncieux, sits on an island in the Seine River, looking toward the hamlet of Gloton, next to the town of Bennecourt, from which she and Monet have presumably rowed. This is the only painting to survive from the brief period that the couple spent in Gloton, which the novelist Émile Zola recommended to Monet as a cheap rural retreat that was easily accessible from Paris. Pentimenti (visible traces of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint) suggest that in an early stage of the painting, Camille held a bonneted child, presumably the couple’s baby, Jean.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
