View to the plain of Argenteuil

View to the Plain of Argenteuil from 1872 at the Musée d'Orsay expands Monet's Argenteuil repertoire beyond the riverside and harbor to the broad agricultural plain that stretched behind the town toward Paris. The plain in 1872 was still primarily agricultural — market gardens supplying Paris with vegetables and flowers, fields of grain, with suburban villas beginning to appear at the edges — and this expansive landscape gave Monet a subject quite different from the more celebrated river scenes. The composition's unusually high proportion of sky — approximately two-thirds of the canvas — reflects the Dutch landscape influence he had absorbed at Zaandam the previous year, where the flat polder and enormous sky were defining features of the landscape tradition. Ruisdael and Hobbema had established the high-sky, low-horizon composition as the canonical form for flat landscape in the seventeenth century; Monet's Argenteuil plain painting engages with that tradition while transforming it through the Impressionist concern for cloud-light and atmospheric vibration.

The sky occupies approximately two-thirds of the canvas, an unusually high proportion that emphasizes the expansive horizon of the plain. Clouds are painted with varied, animated strokes of blue, grey, and white. The flat plain below is broadly handled with warm summer tones of gold and green.