 Hi everybody, my name is Martha Lucy and I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barnes. And today we are going to be looking at a painting by Monet called The Studio Boat. So here it is, I'm going to show you what it looks like in the Barnes galleries. There it is hanging over in the corner. So this was painted by Monet in 1876. And he painted this when he was living in Argenteuil, which is a town not far from Paris. It's right on the river, the Seine River. And you know, it was maybe a, it is like a 15 minute train ride from Paris. And so it was very, it was becoming a very popular place for Parisians to go to, you know, take canoe trips out there or to go sailing because there was a big part of the river kind of opened up into a, into a big basin right in Argenteuil. So Monet lived there from 1871 to 1878 with his wife. He rented a house. The house was not far from the water. You could see, you could see the river from, from the studio. And he would, he would go right outside and, and paint scenes around the river. He would paint the boats. But he realized that he really wanted to be painting from the middle of the water. And so he had, he had earned, he had had a pretty big sale that year. And it allowed him to buy an old fishing boat. So this was around 1872. He had, you know, a year after he had moved there. He bought this old fishing boat and had it outfitted with his painting supplies. And he would take the boat out. He never went all that far from Argenteuil, but he would go to different spots. He would go out into the basin and he could get up close to the sailboats, say, that he wanted to paint. He would paint kind of scenes that had buildings in the background sometimes. He would go to all sorts of different spots. But here you can see that he's chosen a more tranquil spot, a sort of narrower, more kind of remote stretch of the sun. And that's part of what I love about this painting is how kind of solitary and tranquil it is and the way that nature is kind of just encroaching from all sides. I mean, there's so much foliage around this part of the river that, you know, you can barely see the sky. And there seems to be all this, you know, this sort of marshy stuff along the sides. But it's not encroaching in a suffocating way. It just feels like sort of, I don't know, sort of comforting in a way and peaceful. So we're looking here at the back of the boat. I'm going to take a sip of my coffee. We're looking here at the back of the boat. You can see that he had this cabin built right in the middle of it. And on the front, this is the front of it up here, there was an awning, which you can't see from this angle, but that's where he would sit. He would sit out in the front and he would set up his easel and he would paint. And there's actually, there's a painting by his friend, Manne, that shows very clearly how he, how it worked. That painting is at the Noya Pinakutek in Munich. And in it, you can see Manne, he's actually at his easel. And his wife is with him. They're just out, you know, for a day on the boat. And she's just sort of enjoying herself and watching him paint. So one thing that I think about is why paint from the middle of the water? I mean, he could have stood on the banks and painted the water. I think that one of the reasons is that being out in the water is such a great expression of the Impressionist ethos, which was to get out there in nature with your canvas, with your supplies and paint directly from your subject, you know. And so he's taking this a step further. He is not just painting the water, he's actually out in the water. And think about, you know, just to sort of immerse himself in the water so that the water is surrounding himself from all sides. And think about what a great subject water is for an artist who is so interested in optical sensation. I mean, and in capturing the fleeting, the fleeting effects of light, the sort of the momentary, because water is all about momentariness, right? It's catching the light, but it's always changing. It's always moving. But I think what's even more interesting about water for Manet is the reflections that it creates. In a sense, water takes the elements of a landscape. So say, you know, the trees, the clouds in the sky, here the boat. And it translates these elements into an image, a kind of ready-made, abstracted image that Monet could paint. And so here, it's like he's getting to paint the studio boat twice, once as it kind of appeared before him, you know, as a physical thing. And then another time as this abstracted image. And look how he translates that physical boat into this abstracted image. I mean, this is where his brushwork really just kind of loosens up. And you can see that he is painting quickly, you know, the sort of the straight line here becomes this squiggly line in the water. And the colors change. He adjusts the colors a little bit just to kind of show that difference. So the sort of the pale green becomes a kind of greenish blue down here. Throughout the painting, I mean, one of the things that I just love so much about this work is the brushwork throughout. He is so free with the brush here, so expressive. And you can see when you look closely how quickly he really is working. Up here in the sky, there are passages where he's actually left the canvas blank, you know, and sort of in between some of the trees. And then that's happening also down here in the water. And then, you know, in the boat itself here, some of the edges of some of these things are just left unfilled. But look at the brushwork. It is, the strokes are moving in all different directions. Some of them are long and wispy. Some of them are kind of short and curved. Some of them are broader and flatter like these. And then you get these long, just squiggly lines. The brushwork, what it does is each of these marks doesn't necessarily, it doesn't really refer necessarily to a specific piece of foliage. It's more meant to evoke the impression of the surrounding foliage. When you look down here, this is one passage that I really love, the place down here where the water meets the marshy area. And look at the way that the water kind of comes in here and sort of pulls, you know, against the marsh, the way that it would in real life, and the way that he just drags this brushstroke on top, see? And then here in the water, you can see that he's using a technique called wet on wet, which is when you don't let the paint layer underneath dry before you apply another paint layer on top. And so when you apply the paint layer on top, some of the bottom layer kind of drags, the color of it drags through, and you can see that happening here, let's see. With the blue, it's like the blue wasn't dry when he applied the white, and so that blue kind of gets dragged through. And then up here, he's using red, but it's kind of combining with the white to create this pink. And also notice that it is that pink is meant to sort of represent the reflection of these red reeds or whatever they are in the water. It's very subtle and beautiful and just very free. So again, why paint in the middle of the water? Well, I think for practical reasons, the painting in the studio boat, it allowed him to get out close to a subject that he wanted to paint, like sailboats, for example, in the basin. And one of his most famous paintings done at Argenteu called the Regatta at Argenteu is at the Musee d'Orsay and was painted from the studio boat. But here, of course, we don't have a view from the boat. We have an actual painting of the boat itself. And he painted the studio boat several times. Sometimes it's kind of way in the distance. It's almost kind of incidental in the painting. But here, it's up close, and it's really the subject of the painting itself. And I think what's interesting when you start to think about the figure here is we always assume that Monet was depicting himself here, that he's showing himself at work on his studio boat. And that poses a really interesting contradiction, because the whole thing about impressionism was that you painted directly from your subject. It was about direct observation, and obviously he wouldn't have been able to observe himself painting from the boat. So what does this mean? Did he just kind of accept that contradiction and do this as a self-portrait? And maybe that's why he kept the figure sort of ambiguous. I mean, it's not clearly, you know, you can't see his features. Maybe that's why the figure is sort of hard to read. I think that there's also, though, the possibility that it's not Monet. When you look closely at it, I think it looks like it could be a woman. It could be his wife. This might be her dress, her hat, and she is maybe sitting here reading a newspaper. We know that she often went on these outings with him. So that's just a thought. Wondering what you think. Thank you for joining me today, and tune in again tomorrow for another Barnes Takeout. Enjoy your day. Thank you.