Red Boats, Argenteuil

Red Boats, Argenteuil from 1875 at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts is among the most formally striking of the Argenteuil boating subjects — the vivid red hulls of the moored boats creating a chromatic accent against the blue-green Seine that demonstrates the complementary color thinking Monet was developing in the mid-1870s. The Fogg Museum, part of Harvard Art Museums, has maintained one of the strongest academic collections of French Impressionism in America, used to educate generations of art historians as well as general visitors. The 1875 date places this canvas between the first and second Impressionist exhibitions, during the period of the group's most intense collective artistic development. Red-hulled boats had appeared in Monet's Argenteuil paintings as early as 1872 — the bright commercial paint used to preserve timber hulls providing ready-made chromatic subjects — and the Fogg canvas pushes the complementary relationship of red and blue-green toward its most saturated expression.

Monet's brushwork is fluid and instinctive, breaking surfaces into interlocking dabs and strokes of pure color that blend optically at viewing distance. His palette captures the chromatic complexity of natural light — lavenders in shadow.