Boating on the River Epte

Boating on the River Epte from 1890 at the São Paulo Museum of Art depicts the Epte River — a small tributary of the Seine that ran through the Giverny property — with Monet's stepdaughters in a flat-bottomed boat. The Epte was the river Monet had diverted to fill his water garden in 1893, and its calm, tree-lined character was quite different from the Seine at Argenteuil where he had made his earlier boating paintings. The 1890 date places this canvas at the beginning of the Haystacks campaign, and the relaxed domestic character of the boating scene contrasts with the intense serial ambition of that simultaneously developing project. Blanche and Suzanne Hoschedé appear regularly in Monet's Giverny figurative works of the late 1880s and early 1890s, paddling along the Epte in the shallow boats he kept there. The São Paulo Museum of Art holds this work as part of the broader Latin American collecting of French Impressionism that developed through European emigrant and dealer networks in the early twentieth century.

Monet's brushwork is characteristically loose and broken, built from comma-like strokes that dissolve solid forms into shimmering surfaces of pure color. He worked rapidly outdoors to capture transient atmospheric effects, layering complementary hues without blending to create optical vibration.