Kollektion Claude Monet, Paul Cassirer,īerlin, October 1–November 10, 1905, no. Goupil Gallery, London, April–May 1889, no. Like Impression, Sunrise, it is incorrectly dated there to 1873. In the four-volume catalogue raisonné of Monet’s paintings compiled by Daniel Wildenstein, The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect is listed as no. 1864, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) and three night views of Leicester Square in London, painted around 1900–01. Despite the seeming abstraction of their visual language, both works bear witness to the artist’s pursuit of an authentic rendering of the motif under specific conditions of weather and light.Īside from this work, Monet’s oeuvre of over two thousand paintings includes only four other night scenes: the painting A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight(ca. The true subject of this stylistically radical work is the flickering of these ultra-modern lights and their reflection on the gently rippling water-unlike the contemporaneous Impression, Sunrise, where Monet explored the reddish shimmer of dawn spreading slowly over the port. The evenly spaced white dots in a horizontal row in the background, however, represent the gas lanterns that had been installed beginning in 1869. A number of red and green lights are also clearly visible, including one at the end of the southern landing stage as well as two side lights on moving boats. The two glowing white dots in the upper left of the picture space represent masthead lights, which were required for steamships and could be seen from a great distance in fair weather, even in the dead of night. Historical photographs, as well as documentation related to the installation of the lighting in Le Havre, demonstrate that Monet rendered the contours of the port with topographical precision. At first glance, the motif of the industrial harbor with its artificial illumination is difficult to discern through the loose, sketch-like brushstrokes. Monet painted The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect in 1872 as a pendant to his seminal work Impression, Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), which attracted attention at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Monet had spent his childhood and youth in Le Havre, a city in Normandy with the second largest port in France, and he repeatedly depicted both the picturesque cliffs along the Atlantic coast and the port area of the economically ambitious region.
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