On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt

Painted in the summer of 1868, when Monet was living on the Seine at Bennecourt, this canvas shows the river before the smoky stations of the seventies — a wide, radiant reach of water and sky in which a lone figure rows between banks of green. The composition still honors the broad horizontal, but the light is no longer held in a single dapple: it is broken into the separate, unblended touches that were soon to be called Impressionism. The rowboat on the calm Seine is an early statement of the plein-air conviction that a picture could be made of the air itself, and it counts among the finest landscapes of Monet’s first decade. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.