Bateau en construction en bord de canal, Paysage hollandais

On the bank of a canal a hull stands open to the sky, its ribs exposed, a half-built ship among the shipwright’s timbers; behind it the water runs flat to a windmill, and above it the sky takes up most of the canvas. Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891) had left Rotterdam for Paris in 1846 to work under Eugène Isabey, and the failure of a first patron sent him home to Holland in 1855 — this canvas, signed and dated 1857, belongs to those Dutch years, when he went back to the low riverscapes of his training and painted them with the freedom he had learned in France: the horizon dropped almost to the bottom edge, the whole upper half given to a broken, moving sky, the light reflected off the water in short touches. He returned to Paris in 1860 and by 1862 was painting beside Monet on the Seine; Monet later called him « a quiet man with such a talent » and said his own eye had been formed by him — which is why this minor-key shipyard scene, in a collection built by the city that gave Monet his first French home, reads as the source of the river painting the Impressionists made their own.