Vallée de la Creuse, effet du soir

Monet's 'Vallée de la Creuse, effet du soir' (Valley of the Creuse, Evening Effect, 1889) belongs to his campaign in the Creuse valley in the Massif Central — a remote, dramatic landscape of deep gorges and rushing rivers that he discovered through George Sand's writing and that provided him with subjects quite different from his usual Normandy and Seine paintings. The evening light over the Creuse valley created the atmospheric conditions of fading daylight and deepening shadow that produced some of his most emotionally resonant landscape paintings. He worked frantically to capture the season's changing conditions before they passed.

The evening effect demands a palette of deepening blues and violets as the light fails — the sky's warm colors above contrasting with the darkening valley below. Monet builds the effect through layered, varied strokes that establish the complex color relationships of twilight, when complementary colors in shadows and lights create the vibrating quality of the last daylight. The Creuse's rocky, forested gorges provided dramatic spatial depth.