Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet

Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet

Le Havre in the mist

Monet painted the port of Le Havre, the town where he grew up, early on a hazy morning. Almost everything is dissolved: the masts of ships and the chimneys and cranes of the docks are thin blue-grey shapes, and smoke drifts off to the left. Three small boats are dark smudges on the water, the nearest with a standing figure at the oar. The sun is a small disc of orange, and its reflection a column of short strokes laid straight onto the canvas. In a black-and-white photograph the sun almost disappears, because it is nearly the same tone as the sky around it. The signature and the date, 72, are at the lower left.

The picture that named a movement

Monet showed it in Paris in 1874, at the first exhibition of the group, held in the photographer Nadar’s former studio on the Boulevard des Capucines. The critic Louis Leroy took its title for a mocking review of the “Impressionists”, and the name stuck. The painting has had an eventful life since: it was stolen from the Musée Marmottan in 1985 and recovered in Corsica in 1990.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and measures 48 by 63 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 5,773-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 38 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris · Wikidata Q328523 · Wikimedia Commons