La Seine, au port Saint-Nicolas

The port of Saint-Nicolas on the Seine was one of Paris's working river ports, busy with the barge traffic that supplied the city with coal, building materials, and agricultural goods before rail fully displaced river transport. Bonneton's view of the port in 1900 documents a stretch of the embankment that was changing rapidly as the river's industrial function gave way to leisure use and tourism surrounding the Universal Exhibition of that year. The Seine's port infrastructure — cranes, barges, riverside warehouses — had been a subject for painters since Jongkind and the early Impressionists, and Bonneton participates in that tradition while bringing a specifically documentary interest to his observation. The Musée Carnavalet holds this as part of its record of the working Seine.

The composition emphasizes the horizontal expanse of the Seine with barge and port architecture arranged in a low band above a reflective water surface. The treatment of the water — broken horizontal strokes merging sky color with reflected stone — shows Bonneton's awareness of the Impressionist river paintings of Monet and Sisley.