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Lot Essay
In early September 1884, during his second year living and painting at Giverny, Monet took his studio-boat for a short trip upstream on the Seine to Jeufosse, a picturesque village on a gently curving bend in the river, nestled protectively at the base of a hillside and shielded from the bustling main channel of the waterway by heavily wooded islands. “There the landscape, shimmering in the iridescent light, was constantly changing,” Daniel Wildenstein has written. “It was Impressionism at its purest, registering instantaneously in a natural setting that was always new and endlessly absorbing” (Monet’s Years at Giverny, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978, p. 15). During the ensuing weeks, Monet returned repeatedly to this tranquil spot and completed a sequence of ten paintings, some looking upstream towards Jeufosse and others in the opposite direction, capturing the seasonal transformation of the deciduous foliage along the banks as late summer gave way to autumn (Wildenstein, nos. 909-917, including 912a).
Within this series, Le train à Jeufosse is exceptional for a sight not seen in Monet’s views of the Seine valley for a full decade, and thereafter never again—a railway train approaches the station in Jeufosse, filling the wooded landscape with plumes of smoke from the coal-fired locomotive. Industrial modernity’s most manifest symbol of progress, the railway had indelibly transformed France within the preceding half-century, facilitating widespread urbanization and an explosive growth in tourism. Here, in a potent contrast of new and old, Monet depicted the train nearing the historic church at Jeufosse as it traveled southwest from Le Havre toward Paris. The train runs parallel to the picture plane, bisecting the canvas along the horizon, while the timeless Seine, long the lifeblood of France, makes a dramatic arc that thrusts into the heart of the composition.
When Monet had settled at Giverny the previous spring, in April 1883, proximity to the Seine had been one of his top priorities, along with a peacefully rural environment and a suitably sized house for his large family. “I have painted the Seine all my life, at all hours of the day, and in every season,” he declared. “I have never been bored with it; to me it is always different” (quoted in ibid., p. 18). By summer 1883, he had built a boathouse on the Île aux Orties, at the confluence of the smaller Epte river with the Seine, and had begun to paint along the length of the latter waterway from Vernon to Port-Villez. “Drifting down the quiet river in his boat,” Andrew Forge has written, “he would watch with a hunter’s concentration for the precise moment when light shimmered on grass or on silver willow leaves or on the surface of the water. Suddenly or by degrees his motif would be revealed to him” (Monet at Giverny, London, 1975, n.p.).
In Le train à Jeufosse, Monet devoted nearly the entire foreground to the description of the gently rippling Seine, which he viewed either from the grassy bank or from his moored studio-boat. The reflections of the silvery foliage and the pink-tinged smoke transform the surface of the water into a tapestry of pastel hues, laid down with an immediacy of touch that bespeaks the artist’s abiding pleasure at working en plein air, in countryside that he found endlessly enchanting.
The first owner of Le train à Jeufosse was the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who received it as a gift from Monet in 1890. Mallarmé was a dedicated proponent of Impressionism, and his glowing reviews of Monet’s work during the 1870s solidified his friendship with the artist. “Claude Monet loves water, and it is his special gift to portray its mobility and transparency, be it sea or river, grey and monotonous, or colored by the sky,” Mallarmé wrote on the occasion of the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. “I have never seen a boat poised more lightly on the water than in his pictures or a veil more mobile and light than his moving atmosphere” (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, p. 32).
In 1889, Mallarmé asked Monet to provide an illustration for “La Gloire,” a prose-poem that conjures a train trip to Fontainebleau, for a planned volume entitled Le tiroir de laque. Monet delighted in the evocative language of the poem but ultimately withdrew from the project, daunted by the techniques of lithography. On 13 July 1890, Mallarmé, Morisot, and Eugène Manet visited Monet at Giverny for a leisurely Sunday celebration in advance of the national holiday. As a token of his enduring friendship, and contrite still about the illustration, Monet invited Mallarmé to select a painting from his studio. The poet chose Le train à Jeufosse and, according to Morisot, cradled it on his lap the whole trip home. “One does not disturb a man experiencing a joy such as the one the contemplation of your painting brings me, dear Monet,” Mallarmé wrote soon after. “My mental health benefits from being able to lose myself in this dazzling sight, at my leisure. I slept little the first night, looking at it” (quoted in K. Lochnan, op. cit., 2004, p. 167).
Le train à Jeufosse remained one of Mallarmé’s prized possessions and passed to his daughter Geneveive upon his death. “A landscape presented as if only glimpsed and yet deliciously precise,” the critic Gustave Geffroy would later write about the painting, “a meander in the river, an arabesque of water running through the countryside, that Mallarmé used to compare to the smile of the Mona Lisa” (quoted in R. Lloyd, op. cit., 1999, p. 122).
Within this series, Le train à Jeufosse is exceptional for a sight not seen in Monet’s views of the Seine valley for a full decade, and thereafter never again—a railway train approaches the station in Jeufosse, filling the wooded landscape with plumes of smoke from the coal-fired locomotive. Industrial modernity’s most manifest symbol of progress, the railway had indelibly transformed France within the preceding half-century, facilitating widespread urbanization and an explosive growth in tourism. Here, in a potent contrast of new and old, Monet depicted the train nearing the historic church at Jeufosse as it traveled southwest from Le Havre toward Paris. The train runs parallel to the picture plane, bisecting the canvas along the horizon, while the timeless Seine, long the lifeblood of France, makes a dramatic arc that thrusts into the heart of the composition.
When Monet had settled at Giverny the previous spring, in April 1883, proximity to the Seine had been one of his top priorities, along with a peacefully rural environment and a suitably sized house for his large family. “I have painted the Seine all my life, at all hours of the day, and in every season,” he declared. “I have never been bored with it; to me it is always different” (quoted in ibid., p. 18). By summer 1883, he had built a boathouse on the Île aux Orties, at the confluence of the smaller Epte river with the Seine, and had begun to paint along the length of the latter waterway from Vernon to Port-Villez. “Drifting down the quiet river in his boat,” Andrew Forge has written, “he would watch with a hunter’s concentration for the precise moment when light shimmered on grass or on silver willow leaves or on the surface of the water. Suddenly or by degrees his motif would be revealed to him” (Monet at Giverny, London, 1975, n.p.).
In Le train à Jeufosse, Monet devoted nearly the entire foreground to the description of the gently rippling Seine, which he viewed either from the grassy bank or from his moored studio-boat. The reflections of the silvery foliage and the pink-tinged smoke transform the surface of the water into a tapestry of pastel hues, laid down with an immediacy of touch that bespeaks the artist’s abiding pleasure at working en plein air, in countryside that he found endlessly enchanting.
The first owner of Le train à Jeufosse was the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who received it as a gift from Monet in 1890. Mallarmé was a dedicated proponent of Impressionism, and his glowing reviews of Monet’s work during the 1870s solidified his friendship with the artist. “Claude Monet loves water, and it is his special gift to portray its mobility and transparency, be it sea or river, grey and monotonous, or colored by the sky,” Mallarmé wrote on the occasion of the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. “I have never seen a boat poised more lightly on the water than in his pictures or a veil more mobile and light than his moving atmosphere” (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, p. 32).
In 1889, Mallarmé asked Monet to provide an illustration for “La Gloire,” a prose-poem that conjures a train trip to Fontainebleau, for a planned volume entitled Le tiroir de laque. Monet delighted in the evocative language of the poem but ultimately withdrew from the project, daunted by the techniques of lithography. On 13 July 1890, Mallarmé, Morisot, and Eugène Manet visited Monet at Giverny for a leisurely Sunday celebration in advance of the national holiday. As a token of his enduring friendship, and contrite still about the illustration, Monet invited Mallarmé to select a painting from his studio. The poet chose Le train à Jeufosse and, according to Morisot, cradled it on his lap the whole trip home. “One does not disturb a man experiencing a joy such as the one the contemplation of your painting brings me, dear Monet,” Mallarmé wrote soon after. “My mental health benefits from being able to lose myself in this dazzling sight, at my leisure. I slept little the first night, looking at it” (quoted in K. Lochnan, op. cit., 2004, p. 167).
Le train à Jeufosse remained one of Mallarmé’s prized possessions and passed to his daughter Geneveive upon his death. “A landscape presented as if only glimpsed and yet deliciously precise,” the critic Gustave Geffroy would later write about the painting, “a meander in the river, an arabesque of water running through the countryside, that Mallarmé used to compare to the smile of the Mona Lisa” (quoted in R. Lloyd, op. cit., 1999, p. 122).