Charbit pulled together images and documents from library collections in Paris, as well as archives from cities and towns all along the Seine. To recall the era when the river was swimmable, she created a life-sized black-and-white cardboard photo montage showing ten champion swimmers from 1913 and 1914. The swimmers’ faces were arranged as cutouts; they could be popped out so that visitors could insert their own into the holes and pose for pictures.
Every island tells its own story, Charbit said. Some disappeared, absorbed into the mainland or larger islands during construction projects. The Île Louviers, which had once almost touched the Île Saint-Louis and was used to stock wood, was joined to the Right Bank to form what is now the Quartier Morland. The Île des Cygnes got its name when Louis XIV populated it entirely with a special variety of swans imported from Denmark. (The swan, considered pure and regal, was the Sun King’s favorite animal.) The island was little more than a sliver of land separated from the Champ de Mars, on the Left Bank, by a canal. In 1773, part of the canal was filled in; the island became part of the Left Bank when the remainder was filled in to accommodate the construction of the Pont d’Iéna in 1812.
Sixty miles upstream from Paris is the Île Olive, which was owned by the mayor of the local commune in the 1880s, Dr. Sébastien Jean Alexandre Olive. When he died, his widow bequeathed the island to the nearby town, and it is now a wooded park with an arboretum and a nature trail. It can be neither sold nor rented; no structures can be erected, no refreshments sold.
The Île Saint-Denis occupies a bend in the river downstream from Paris. A functioning town with its own mayor, it is home to both artisans whose work is connected to the river and warehouses for department stores like Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. The island is destined for fame—and perhaps fortune—as the site of the Paris Summer Olympic Village in 2024.
Other islands are human creations. The Île aux Cygnes, a long, slender island near the Eiffel Tower, was created in 1827 and named in honor of the defunct Île des Cygnes. It served as a reinforcement for three new bridges and was part of a project to deepen the Seine. Wild plants like thistles, poppies, mallow, and bindweed crowd its walls, which slope steeply from the embankment to below the waterline. Bird species like mallard ducks, gray wagtails, short-toed tree creepers, and sometimes great crested grebes call the island home. A promenade running the length of the island is lined with sixty tree species. At the island’s western edge stands a quarter-size version of the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a clump of weeping willows that gives refuge to tiny, transparent freshwater shrimp.
Early one evening, I joined Charbit and other Seine experts on an invitation-only boat tour of the islands in and around Paris. Purplegray rain clouds hovered above us as we boarded from the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville. Armed with her microphone, Charbit took to the deck while we headed west, reaching as far as the Île Saint-Germain. Once a military camp, the island now contains businesses, residences, and a sculpture park, which features an eighty-foot-tall work by Jean Dubuffet that is considered one of his most important.
A few raindrops fell on the crowd, and then the sky burst open. We moved inside, close to the bar. When the boat turned to head back to central Paris, the sun pierced the clouds. As we passed the Eiffel Tour, a double rainbow appeared, as if on cue.
It was if we had entered what Proust called “the enchanted essence” of Monet’s paintings. In writing about them, Proust singled out the ones “strewn with islands in those inert hours of the afternoon when the river is white and blue with clouds and sky.”
PART FOUR
From City to Sea
Auguste Renoir’s painting Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), depicting a scene on the balcony at the Maison Fournaise on the island of Chatou. Maison Fournaise is still a popular restaurant today. THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON, D.C., USA. ACQUIRED 1923. / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.
TWENTY-THREE
River of Light
The Seine! I painted it all my life,
at all hours, in all seasons, from
Paris to the sea . . . I never tired of
it: it is for me always new. . . . I built
myself a studio in a boat. It was a
sort of quite large cabin: one could
sleep there. I lived there, with my
material, spying on the effects of the
light from one dusk to another.
—CLAUDE MONET
AS THE SEINE LOOPS northwest out of Paris, through the prosperous suburbs of Île-de-France and into the farmland of Normandy, it glides into its ancient role as a roadway from Paris to the sea. Merchants, traders, adventurers, and invaders explored and exploited this final stretch of its route; even as it still functions as a commerical workhorse, boaters and tourists also travel it for pleasure. A century and a half ago, it carried bold painters into an artistic revolution.
The painters were entranced with the new idea of painting outdoors amid the chalk cliffs and woodlands of Normandy. The landscape that caressed the Seine’s serpentine curves became an open-air studio, freeing the painters from the confines of their ateliers. The play of light on the river dared them to experiment. The weather, changing dramatically, whimsically, and without warning, required them to quicken their tempo and improvise. Their artistic adventures coincided with a technical discovery: the invention of zinc paint tubes. No longer did artists have to laboriously prepare colors by mixing pigments and oils in their studios. They could now easily work outside and, in doing so, learn about the light, the flow, the reflections, the colors of water.
“You go back in the history of art before the Impressionists, and water didn’t move,” my painter friend Richard Overstreet told me. “The great Venetian painters like Canaletto painted the canals of Venice and the sea and all of that, and the water—it’s flat. It’s a hard surface. The Impressionists, they thought about water. They thought about the Seine, how it moves and how it is lit. It’s very hard to paint water; it’s one of the hardest things to paint, because it’s transient. But they did it.”
Artists have depicted the Seine for centuries. Illustrated manuscripts from 1317 show everyday river scenes, like boats carrying wine, grain, and fish, alongside images of Saint Denis, the patron saint of France. On one page of Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, a fifteenth-century collection of prayers for the canonical hours, the Seine flows past the Louvre as everyman’s source of leisure, with small wooden boats moored at the river’s edge and people strolling on its banks. In woodcuts from the same era, haulers and traders work the quays. Eighteenth-century pastoral paintings in the Musée Carnavalet show the Seine in Paris before its encasement in concrete and stone, with riverbanks easing into the river so fluidly that horses and cows wade in to drink and cool off. The museum also holds a series of large panoramic landscapes of the Seine by the eighteenth-century painter Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste Raguenet, who was so fascinated by daily life on the river that he captured it on canvas with the precision of a photographer. He documented both happy events, like a water jousting celebration, and tragedies, like the inferno at the city’s oldest hospital in 1772, in which he filled the sky with violent orange and yellow flames.
Much later, the Seine transformed the style of the twentieth-century American painter Ellsworth Kelly, who arrived in Paris as a twenty-five-year-old student on the GI Bill after World War II. Transfixed by the patterns of light that scattered and spread across the river, in 1951 he painted Seine. It consisted of small black and white rectangles that incorporated chance into what became a geometric view of the movement of the river. And, of course, there was Impressionism.
Normandy offered a more cosmopolitan life than other French provinces, and as Paris became more crowded and industrial, the region became the city’s artistic extension. The railroad, another innovation, made it easily reachable. The painters boarded the trains with their easels and paint tubes and followed the Seine westward, through towns and cities like Giverny and Rouen, until they reached the sea
at Le Havre and Honfleur.
Eugène Boudin, born in Honfleur where the Seine meets the sea, was one of the first plein air landscape artists, and he succeeded in luring Claude Monet outdoors. “It was as if a veil were torn from my eyes,” Monet wrote in a letter late in life. “I grasped what painting could be.” In the beginning of the 1860s, a sort of artistic commune was created at La Ferme Saint Siméon, a country inn set in an apple orchard outside Honfleur. There, the close-knit trio of Monet, Boudin, and Johan Jongkind, as well as their friends Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Frédéric Bazille, James McNeill Whistler, and Adolphe-Félix Cals, met to drink and discuss their art. Below them was the great, nearly nine-mile-wide expanse of the Seine estuary. The hotel has been restored and largely preserved. Note to Monet lovers: his favorite room was No. 22.
Monet painted the Seine for the rest of his life, at any time of day or season of the year. While he was in Argenteuil, northwest of Paris, looking for a riverboat to convert into a floating studio, he met Gustave Caillebotte, a painter who was a boating fanatic—and rich enough to support his hobby. Together they found what became Monet’s “studio boat,” where he often worked, keeping many paintings going simultaneously. Once, when a journalist asked to see his studio, Monet gestured to the Seine and the rolling hills beyond it and replied, “This is my studio.” He called his landscapes of water and their reflections “an obsession.” The river both infuriated and liberated him.
Once the river almost lured Monet to his death. He struggled with depression and nearly committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight. “I was so upset yesterday that I had the stupidity to throw myself into the water,” he wrote to fellow painter Frédéric Bazille in the summer of 1868. “Fortunately, no harm came of it.” (Monet was a good swimmer.)
The river also brought Monet peace. It freed him to focus on color and light, to experiment with brushstrokes. He played with the water, dimpling it like peaks of meringue and flattening it like a mirror. In 1872, at Le Havre, Monet painted a sunrise in his new style and called it Impression, soleil levant (“Impression, Sunrise”). He included it in an exhibition of thirty artists’ work in 1874, organized in retaliation against the Paris Salon, an annual showcase of academic art. The critic Louis Leroy mocked the title of Monet’s painting, writing that the exhibition was full of “impressionists.” Rather than taking offense, the group embraced their new identity. Impressionism was born.
As soon as the outdoors seduced him, Monet said he did not understand why artists would choose to shut themselves up in closed rooms. “To draw, yes; to paint, no,” he wrote. In 1883, he moved to Giverny, a town in Île-de-France on the edge of Normandy, where the Epte River cuts through meadows and flows into the Seine. He bought a manor house, planted elaborate gardens, and dug a pond, which he filled with water lilies. He took his barge to a nearby river landing. Over the years, he expanded his fleet with two mahogany-hulled sculls and a rowing skiff with a high prow. In the summers of 1896 and 1897, he often left his house as early as three-thirty in the morning and went out on his studio boat to await the blue-gray-lavender light in the mists of dawn.
Monet’s residence in Giverny is the Versailles of the Impressionist movement. The garden, with its changing seasonal blooms and lily ponds, wooden footbridge, climbing wisteria, and the house, just as it was (well, almost) when Monet lived there—all raise this site high up on the must-see list of any tourist with even the slightest interest in Impressionist art. Because of Monet, this once-unknown village on the slopes of the Seine is a place of pilgrimage for painters, private collectors, museum curators, politicians, and tourists.
And like Versailles, it is overcrowded. Getting in and out of the long, narrow house of rose-pink plaster can be a horror. There’s usually a wait to get into the house and gridlock in the narrow corridors. Not one painting by Monet hangs on its walls; they are all reproductions. But the house is worthy of a visit, if only to see Monet’s spacious kitchen, decorated in blue-and-white Rouen tiles and hung with shiny copper pots, and, in both the kitchen and other rooms, the Japanese engravings he collected with such passion.
One of Henri Matisse’s most famous paintings evoking the Seine, Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, completed in 1916. He painted it in his apartment studio overlooking the Seine. Île de la Cité and the tip of Notre-Dame Cathedral are visible in the background. © 2019 SUCCESSION H. MATISSE / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. ARCHIVES HENRI MATISSE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
In the village, the rue Claude Monet is lined with galleries showing work by local wannabe Monets and small restaurants that post multilingual menus outside. Some are good, some are bad. The most peaceful place is the tiny cemetery where Monet is buried. So pilgrims still find Monet’s spirit at Giverny. It is the place where he painted some of his most famous works, including an ambitious series of more than twenty paintings entitled Morning on the Seine. He studied views along the river, painted them from his boat, then lined them up in his studio and finished them off together.
There are other ways to experience the world of the Impressionists. Several towns and islands west of Paris have “Impressionist” walks along the Seine. Visitors are guided to the exact spot where painters stood while they worked; plaques show reproductions of the famous paintings created there.
One Sunday morning Andy and I headed to Rueil-Malmaison, a town about a twenty-minute train ride northwest of Paris, for a boat tour devoted to the Impressionists. Across the river is the Île de Chatou, known as the Island of the Impressionists. We boarded the Tivano, a pleasure craft, and perched ourselves in comfortable metal armchairs in the front row. “I invite you to look at the density of green colors that we find in the paintings, and the light that projects on this greenery,” our guide said. It wasn’t the most exciting presentation, but for the older French crowd out for a Sunday afternoon outing on the river, it was good enough. She told us that Impressionist painters were visual journalists, because they documented the festivities and leisure activities of their era, particularly as they were enjoyed outside Paris. “Because this place was a bit difficult to access, it was also where the police could not come, so you can imagine some of the things that went on here,” she said.
We passed the town of Bougival, a small but important urban center where the Impressionists and others—including Renoir, Sisley, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Cézanne, Bazille, Berthe Morisot, Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck—gathered and painted. In summertime, the composer Georges Bizet lived there, too. “It is said that he committed suicide in the Seine because he was completely crushed by the negative reviews of Carmen,” our guide related. “What is certain is that he swam in the Seine when it was much too cold and suffered a fatal heart attack afterward.” (The truth is more complex. Bizet suffered from serious throat problems and was depressed after his opera Carmen failed. Feeling better one day in the spring of 1875, he went for a swim in the Seine. Racked by pain and a high fever the next day, he had two heart attacks and died. He was thirty-six.)
Renoir and Sisley felt such a strong connection to the river that in the summer of 1865, along with Sisley’s brother Henry, they piloted a boat from Chatou all the way to Le Havre to meet Monet (Le Havre was his hometown) and watch a regatta. “I am taking my paint box in order to make sketches of the places I like. I think it will be charming,” Renoir wrote to Bazille in asking him to come along. “There’s nothing to keep you from leaving a place you don’t like; nor anything to keep you from staying on in an enjoyable one.” Renoir described the trip as “a long sea voyage in a sailing boat,” even though they did not sail the entire way but had to be towed from Chatou to Rouen. There, they visited the cathedral. From Rouen on, they sailed toward Le Havre, passing steamboats, tugboats, and schooners, and marveling at the bustling industrial traffic along the way.
Well into the nineteenth century, navigation was difficult in this part of the Seine. The river twisted back on itself like a coiling snake. The current was fickle. Eventually a system
of locks controlled the river flow. On our tour, the captain maneuvered our boat into a narrow lock, and we waited while the water level dropped.
We were only a few miles from Paris, but we had entered another world. Thick walls of trees and bushes alive with color—from deep green to pale gray—conjured throughts of an Amazonian jungle. The water was perfectly still, reflecting the vegetation like a mirror. Swans swam alongside us. A man in an inflatable kayak rowed past. Families picnicked and fished. On the way back to the dock, we came upon the red brick and yellow stone façade and wrought-iron railings of La Maison Fournaise on the Île de Chatou. Awnings shielded the diners from the sun. It was here that Renoir painted Luncheon of the Boating Party.
THE STORY STARTED with Alphonse Fournaise, who came from a family of bargemen. In 1860, he created a recreational site to attract the day-trippers coming by train to the countryside suburbs of Chatou, Argenteuil, Asnières, and Bougival. La Maison Fournaise became a gathering place for Parisians of different classes and professions—painters, writers, financiers, politicians, shopgirls. People came to rent rowboats, swim in the river, enjoy a meal, and even stay the night. The Fournaise family held on to the property until 1953, when the building was sold and cut up into apartments. It soon turned shabby, was abandoned, and attracted squatters. In 1979, the town of Chatou bought it, renovating it one section at a time. It reopened as a restaurant eleven years later. After intense lobbying, Marie-Christine Davy, president of the Association of the Friends of La Maison Fournaise, persuaded local politicians to give the building landmark status. These days, an outdoor wall shows off the building’s importance with the words “Maison Fournaise, Musée, Restaurant” painted in large red and black letters. A small white sign leads to the “Renoir walk,” a circuit that invites visitors to study the sites in Chatou painted by the artist.
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