About this work
The eye enters this canvas through sheer geological force. For this trio of paintings, Monet repositioned himself slightly upstream, taking in the hills sloping steeply in from the left with a solitary oak tree standing on the opposite side of the river.
Rather than monumental mounds silhouetted against the sky, triangles of cascading strips of color suggest the rocky slopes, while "rivulets of contrasting color" in the lower right indicate the point at which the river bends and flows toward the confluence.
Each canvas in the Petite Creuse trio registers the effects of sunlight and shadows hitting the face of a hill or cliff, with purple hollows deepening the natural crevices. The surface is extraordinarily active: counterbalancing the long horizontal strokes used to suggest the cascading crevices of this rugged terrain are flicks of color applied in smaller touches to suggest rippling waters.
The result carries a woven, skein-like quality with an extraordinarily high-hued palette — violet, russet, cold green, and pale sky blue woven together into something that reads as both faithful and feverish.
Monet spent three months in the remote Creuse valley in central France beginning in early March 1889, after visiting the region for a few days with art critic Gustave Geffroy in February. The campaign was brutal: the artist endured colds, cramps, chapped hands that required gelatin-lined gloves, and lumbago, while suffering from enormous anxiety and fatigue.
He began this canvas — one of three of the Petite Creuse — in April 1889, but only returned to it later that spring, by which time the landscape had changed considerably; the oak tree was sprouting leaves, obscuring the view he had already established, so Monet hired workers to defoliate the tree so that he could re-create its earlier appearance.
Despite bouts of poor health and bad weather, he returned to Giverny having painted 24 canvases — work that constituted his first planned and rigorously defined series of paintings.
Monet included numerous Creuse scenes among his 145 submissions to a blockbuster joint exhibition with sculptor Auguste Rodin in the summer of 1889 at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris — a moment that announced the arrival of an artist fully in command of a radical new method.
This is a painting that rewards a room with some breathing space and strong, directional light — a study, a reading room, a hallway wide enough to step back and let the landscape open up. Its palette of violet shadows and mineral greys grounds it without ever turning cold; Monet observed the rounded rise
