Claude Monet : “Morning on the Seine near Giverny” (1897)

“For me,” said Claude Monet, “a landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; but it lives by virtue of its surroundings, the air and the light which vary continually.” In order to convey the dynamic nature of the landscape, or other motif in which he was interested, he often worked in series, painting the same subject under different conditions.

Produced from 1896-1897, his Mornings on the Seine series was painted from a floating platform that he converted into a studio. According to The National Museum of Western Art, the works of this series are known for the “introduction of a decorative effect and the numerous colors used in their depiction of the misty Seine river on summer mornings.” The Art Institute of Chicago, meanwhile, observes that each piece “is nearly square in shape, a format that allowed the artist to play with the concepts of symmetry and balance…the equivalence of object and reflection, and the tension between the two-dimensionality of the canvas and the three-dimensional space depicted on it.”