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From Brooklyn Museum, New York:
Throughout his sixty-year painting career, Monet captured the shifting light and color of the Seine River, often from a flat-bottomed studio boat as seen here. In this painting, Monet brushes dawn’s pastel hues in short, hatched strokes to suggest the jutting volumes of an island’s foliage, a texture that loses definition in the ripples of the Seine’s reflection. The broad expanses of prepared but unpainted canvas in this work suggest that it served as an initial, unfinished study for his later paintings of the river.