Maisons au bord de la route

Maisons au bord de la route (Houses along the Road) from 1885 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta belongs to Monet's informal survey of the Norman countryside around Giverny — the roadside farmhouses and village architecture that constituted the inhabited landscape beyond the garden. His Norman rural subjects extended well beyond the famous garden and water garden to include roads, farmhouses, orchards, and the vernacular architecture of the Seine valley villages he had known since settling at Giverny. The Norman farmhouse — stone walls, thatched or slate roof, flowering climbers on the facade — was a subject with a long tradition in French landscape painting running from the Barbizon painters through to the later Normandy subjects of Monet's own generation. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which has developed strong European and American collections since its founding, holds this canvas as part of its French Impressionist holdings that represent Monet's middle period alongside works from other major series. The roadside houses subject provides evidence of the full range of Monet's Giverny-period landscapes beyond the garden and water subjects that dominate the canonical account of his late career.

Monet renders the roadside houses with his characteristic atmospheric approach — the specific quality of the Norman light on the traditional farmhouse buildings and the road surface creating the composition's tonal unity. His brushwork adapts to the specific qualities of the subject: the relatively solid forms of the houses given more structured handling than his atmospheric sky or water subjects, while the surrounding vegetation receives the broken, flickering touch he used for natural forms in light.