Description
A woman in a white dress sits perched on the stern of a beached rowing boat, her yellow straw hat catching the light as she looks out across the water. The boat itself, propped up on its side with oars crossed beneath her, is painted in warm ochre and brown strokes that stand out against the cool blues of the river beyond.
Out on the water, a second boat, this one bright red, cuts a diagonal path across the reflections, its colour repeated in a streak of red brushed straight down into the river below it. The water fills most of the canvas in broken strokes of blue, white and pale green, choppy rather than still, with light breaking across the surface in short quick dashes.
Beyond the far bank, a cream-coloured house with an orange-red roof sits among low trees and hills rendered in soft blue-green, while a tiny figure in the distance walks along the grass, barely more than a few strokes of white and red. Closer to us, a stand of willow and shrub, painted in loose yellow-green touches, screens part of the view and leads the eye down toward a wooden fence at the right edge of the canvas. Leisure on the water at Bougival, boats, bright dresses, a breezy afternoon, sits at the very centre of the Impressionist subject matter he shared with Monet and the other painters working the Seine in these same years.
The whole scene is built on the contrast between the warm boat and cool river, sunlight breaking everything into small strokes of colour rather than smooth surfaces. It reads at a distance as a bright, breezy afternoon on the water, and up close as a field of quick, confident brushmarks, blue against gold, that never quite settle into stillness.
