Flower Beds at Vétheuil

Flower Beds at Vétheuil from around 1881 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston belongs to the modest but genuine garden Monet tended at Vétheuil during the difficult combined-household years with Alice Hoschedé. The Vétheuil garden was nothing like the designed wonder he would create at Giverny — a small domestic space attached to a rented house in a Seine-side village — but Monet's engagement with it as a painting subject anticipates the far more ambitious Giverny garden project. The flower beds at Vétheuil, with the Seine and the village of Lavacourt visible in the distance beyond, create a spatial depth that his Giverny garden paintings would largely eliminate as his focus moved closer to the water's surface. By 1881, the worst of the Vétheuil period — Camille's death in 1879, the catastrophic winter of 1879–80 — had passed, and these flower bed canvases have a quality of domestic recovery. The MFA Boston holds this work within a substantial Monet collection that traces the development from early Normandy subjects through the mature serial paintings.

The flower beds fill the lower two-thirds of the canvas in a mass of colour — reds, pinks, whites — set against the blue-grey of the river and the town of Vétheuil beyond. Monet uses rapid, gestural strokes for the individual blooms, the mass of colour reading as impression rather than botanical inventory. The spatial recession to the river and town behind is loosely handled.