Vétheuil

Vétheuil from 1879 at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne is one of the canonical images of the small Seine-side village that served as Monet's base from 1878 to 1881 — the most personally difficult but also one of the most artistically important periods of his career. The view of the village from the opposite bank of the Seine, the Romanesque church reflected in the river below, was his most repeated Vétheuil motif: he painted it in summer, autumn, winter, under snow and ice, in fog and clear weather, pursuing through repetition the same investigation of a single motif under varying conditions that he would formalize in the Haystacks series a decade later. The National Gallery of Victoria holds this canvas as the centerpiece of its French Impressionist collection — the distance of Australia from Europe did not prevent major institutions from acquiring Impressionist works through the international dealer network that Durand-Ruel built from the 1870s onward. The Melbourne canvas represents the global dispersal of Monet's vision: the same village views that line the walls of the Musée d'Orsay also hang in Washington, Melbourne, New York, and St. Petersburg.

Monet typically views Vétheuil from the opposite bank of the Seine, the church and town reflected in the river below. The reflection creates a mirror structure that doubles the motif, the reflected image typically rendered with more dissolved, horizontal strokes than the buildings above. The palette shifts with the season and time of day depicted.