The present work depicts Vétheuil, the small village situated sixty kilometres north of Paris on the riverbanks of the Seine, where the artist lived with his wife and children from 1878 until 1881. Unlike Monet’s previous home of Argenteuil, Vétheuil was further along the Seine and thus slightly out of reach for Parisians escaping the city on a weekend. As a result, both the village and surrounding countryside had remained largely untouched and the remote setting became the ideal vehicle for Monet’s increasing interest in painting nature en plein air. Monet became completely absorbed in depicting the natural world; creating a pastoral idyll out of Vétheuil and its bucolic surroundings, and in doing so nurturing his art to the point at which it reached the purest expression of the Impressionist style.

Monet’s views of Vétheuil frequently include the impressive medieval buildings of the town, as seen from many points in the surrounding area, most particularly the imposing thirteenth century church of Notre-Dame de Vétheuil. However, Monet’s growing interest in nature and the change in climate at different times of day and in different seasons, became ever more noticeable in his canvases during this period. By 1880, his focus had moved away from the architectural features of the village and towards the natural phenomenon of the landscape. Perfectly demonstrated by the present work, the church is now partially obscured by the poplar trees and full attention is given to the verdant vegetation and its reflection in the river in the foreground. With regard to the artist's technique in the 1880s, Andrew Forge has written, ‘Colour which he now learned to use with an unprecedented purity offers an infinitely subtle and flexible alternative to the traditional massing of light and shade. Systems of interlocking blues and oranges, for example, of lilacs and lemons will carry the eye across the whole surface of the canvas and these colour structures, each marvellously turned to the particulars of light will be augmented by a vast range of accents of comma, slash, dot, flake, each attuned economically to its object that the eye is continually at work in its reading’ (A. Forge, Claude Monet (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1976).

The present work is one of five works painted from the banks of Lavacourt looking across the Île Musard towards Vétheuil. The present work is most closely related to Vétheuil en été, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 2) and Vue de Vétheuil, now at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (fig. 3). Although both canvases display a strong interest in capturing the atmospheric effect of the landscape along with the instantaneousness of his subject, it is the present work that embodies the essence of Impressionist painting: painted in vibrant and intense colours, it displays a variety of brushstrokes and the dappled effect of light across the trees and water is exemplary.

Monet's paintings from Vétheuil evidence a critical development in the evolution of his style, when he began to strike out from the already established techniques of the early Impressionist imagery that he had perfected while living in Argenteuil in the 1870s. The Vétheuil canvases strike a balance between the naturalist-realist origins of Impressionism and a boldly experimental approach to capturing the changing qualities of light, a technique that became an increasingly important element in his series paintings of the late 1880s and early 1900s. This small stretch of the Seine provided innumerable opportunities for Monet to observe the same, or similar, views in different seasons and at different times of day, and to explore the resulting nuances of light and colour. Returning to the same stretch of river over a number of years allowed Monet to observe it in all its moods; capturing it bathed in the crisp, warm light of a spring day as in the present work and by way of contrast, in the sombre, muted tones that he used to evoke the particularly harsh winter of 1879-80.

The significance of Vétheuil for Monet's artistic pursuits was evoked in an interview the artist provided to Emile Taboureux from La Vie Moderne in 1880. As Daniel Wildenstein describes, 'The highlight of the interview was Monet's abrupt reaction to the request to see his studio: "My studio! I have 'never' had a studio, and can't understand how one can shut oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no." And then the declaration: "There is my studio!", with a sweeping gesture embracing the Seine, the hills and Vétheuil as a whole' (D. Wildenstein, Monet or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1996, vol. I, p. 162).

The town of Vétheuil would remain an important influence on the artist’s work and he returned to the site twenty years later when he painted fifteen canvases of the view of Vétheuil (fig. 4). His treatment of the same subject matter demonstrates a shift in his aesthetic objectives. No longer was he concerned with the buildings and trees as objects per se, instead, his concentration now focused primarily on the effects of the natural light as it illuminated the landscape and changed the atmospheric quality of the surroundings as a whole.