The Seine at Bas-Meudon (1865): Art, History and Details

The Seine at Bas-Meudon (1865) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Johan Barthold Jongkind (Dutch, 1819–1891).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although born and trained in Holland, Jongkind spent much of his life painting outdoors in France. In this depiction of Bas-Meudon near Paris, the artist applied paint in small patches of bright color to suggest the intensity of outdoor light. Although typcially finished in the studio from open-air sketches, Jongkind's oil paintings achieve a convincing immediacy that greatly impressed the young Claude Monet. The two met in the early 1860s and spent part of a summer painting together along the coast of Normandy. "From that time he was my real master," Monet later acknowledged, "it was to him that I owe the final education of my eye."

Object facts

• Title: The Seine at Bas-Meudon
• Date: 1865
• Creator attribution: Johan Barthold Jongkind (Dutch, 1819–1891)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 55.6 x 69.5 x 11.1 cm (21 7/8 x 27 3/8 x 4 3/8 in.); Unframed: 34.1 x 48.1 cm (13 7/16 x 18 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1993.236

A detail from the museum

Fellow artist Edouard Manet considered Jongkind the "father of modern landscape painting."

Collection credit

Gift of the family of Constance Mather Bishop

Further reading listed by the museum

• Moreau-Nélaton, Etienne. Jongkind raconté par lui-même. Paris, France: H. Laurens, 1918.
• Coe, Nancy. The History of the Collecting of European Paintings and Drawings in the City of Cleveland. Thesis M.A. Oberlin College, 1955.
• Hefting, Victorine. Jongkind d'après sa correspondance. Utrecht, Netherlands: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1969.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.