The hamlet of Port-Villez sits across the Seine and immediately to the south of Monet’s beloved Giverny. In Les Îles à Port-Villez, Monet’s sheer mastery of brush, paint and canvas are displayed at their most powerful and instantaneous. Evoking, seemingly effortlessly, a moment of quiet along the banks of this mighty river, this painting captures the essence of Impressionism, some twenty-five years after Monet had first put a name to a nascent, rebellious movement with Impression, Sunrise (see fig. 1).
Les Îles à Port-Villez comes from a group of six related canvases focusing on a cluster of tidal islands which formed where the Seine and Epte rivers met (W. 1489-94; see figs. 2-7). One of these islands, L’Île au Orties (The Island of Nettles), held a boathouse Monet had constructed to circumvent the problem of rambunctious local youths: “He had discovered that it was unsafe to leave the boats out in the open; the village boys had found them tethered to the riverbank and cut the moorings, leaving them to drift away to the barrage downstream. Monet’s floatilla had grown of the years; as well as the studio-boat he now had two skulls with varnished mahogany hulls and a ‘norvègienne,’ a sleek rowing skiff with a high prow” (D. Skeggs, River of Light, Monet’s Impressions of the Seine, New York, 1987, p. 130). Of these six canvases the present work and La Seine près de Giverny (fig. 7) are by far the largest and take a broader view of the scene.
The present work is directly related to Monet’s 1896-97 series Matinée sur la Seine which sought to capture the ephemeral nature of sunrise at a particular point on the river. While the perspective of these six canvases varies from that of the Matinée sur la Seine, Monet treated them as a portion of the group: “When Monet exhibited the Mornings on the Seine at the Galerie Georges Petit in June 1898, he included eighteen paitnigns that were described as Série des Matins sur la Seine. Of that group, fifteen were canvases most traditionally recognized as the Mornings on the Seine paintings… but three were from the later portion of the series such as the present painting [W. 1489, see fig. 2]. In this work, along with five others, Monet turned his boat… around and painted the Île au Orties, or Isle of Nettles, which lay behind him. It is clear, because of the way they were designated in the catalogue from the Petit exhibition, that Monet considered these slightly later works to be a part of his series of Mornings on the Seine” (T. Paul in Monet and the Seine: Impressions of a River, op. cit., p. 146; see fig. 8).
Monet’s focus on these early morning scenes and the atmospheric oils that emerged were the product of a rigorous schedule on the river. During the summer and early fall of 1896 and 1897, Monet rose at 3:30 each morning, well before dawn. Already installed in his house and growing gardens in Giverny, he would equip himself with dew-resistant clothing and head across the road and fields towards the confluence of the river Epte and the Seine. Rowing just a short distance from the shore, he would board his Bateau-atelier and set off downstream to a calm bend in the river. Each morning, weather permitting, he would work on numerous canvases as the sun rose, capturing the effects of the lightening sky and clarifying reflections and contrasts between the water, woods and clouds. An assistant from his garden would join him on these trips, maneuvering and organizing the canvases for the artist as the dawn progressed. The details of his daily sojourns were captured by the journalist Maurice Guillemot, who provided an animated account of the artist’s quotidian life at Giverny in the last years of the nineteenth century.
Some months before a portion of his Matinée sur la Seine series was exhibited at Galerie Georges Petit in 1898, Monet invited Guillemot to observe his working process. In the ensuing article published in La Revue illustrée on March 15, 1898, Guillemot details his visit: “The crack of dawn, in August, 3:30 AM. His torso snug in a white woolen hand-knit, his feet in a pair of sturdy hunting boots with thick, dew-proof soles, his head covered by a picturesque battered brown felt hat with the brim turned down to keep off the sun, a cigarette in his mouth—a spot of brilliant fire in his great, bushy beard—he pushed open the door, walks down the steps, follows the central path through his garden, where his flowers awaken and unfold as day breaks, crosses the road (at this hour deserted), slips through the picket fence beside the railroad track leading from Gisors, skirts the pond mottled with water lilies, steps over the brook lapping against the willows, plunges into the mist-dimmed meadows, and comes to the river. There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes, reaches the large punt at anchor which serves as his studio. The local man, a gardener’s helper, who accompanies him, unties the packages—as they call the stretched canvases joined in pairs and numbered—and the artist sets to work…. This is where the Epte River flows into the Seine, among tiny islands shaded by tall trees, where branches of the river, like peaceful, solitary lakes beneath the foliage, form mirrors of water reflecting the greenery; this is where, since last summer, Claude Monet has been working” (reproduced in C.F. Stuckey, ed., Monet. A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 195).
Les Îles à Port-Villez bears a wonderful immediacy and vitality. The brushstrokes, clearly visible, convey Monet’s painting method and the atmospheric effects of the placid Seine. A suffusion of warmth is evoked by the palette which blends purples, pinks, blue and greens to capture the transient nature of the islands’ reflection on the river’s surface. For the remainder of his life, Monet would focus intently on just such effects—the nature of light, reflection and atmosphere—whether conveyed in imposing works such as this London and Venice canvases or his beloved depictions of his waterlily pond at Giverny.
Les Îles à Port-Villez has a distinguished provenance. Acquired from the artist by Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1919 it was sold the same year to Cornelius Vanderbilt Barton, the great-nephew of Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt. On his death the work passed to his second wife Grace Underwood Barton who in turn bequeathed it to the Brooklyn Museum in 1968.