MURA · THE COLLECTION · CLAUDE MONET

Régates à Argenteuil

Sailing boats race on the Seine at Argenteuil, and their sails and the houses on the far bank come apart in the water as blocks of colour. Claude Monet painted it around 1872, the year after he moved to the town, and it came to the French state in the bequest of his friend and patron Gustave Caillebotte.

Claude Monet · 1872 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

A regatta on the river with the sails leaning in the wind, and beneath them a reflection that is painted as freely as anything Monet made in the 1870s: short, separate strokes of white, red, blue and ochre that only become boats and houses when you step back. On a television the eye can do the stepping back for you. The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, accession number RF 2778; the record on Wikimedia Commons gives it as oil on canvas, 48 by 75 centimetres, dated 1872.

How it was painted

Monet moved to Argenteuil in 1871 and, as his biography records, "acquired a sailboat to paint on the river". The town was a centre for sailing on the Seine, close enough to Paris for weekend regattas, and its river, bridges and boats became his subject for the next six years. Two years after this canvas, in 1874, he showed with the group of painters whose first independent exhibition gave Impressionism its name, taken by a mocking critic from his Impression, Sunrise. Régates à Argenteuil is that manner at its loosest: a sketch's speed on a finished canvas.

Where it went

The painting belonged to Gustave Caillebotte, the painter and collector who supported Monet in the 1870s. It "was left to the French state in 1894" in Caillebotte's bequest, the gift that brought the core of the Impressionist collection into public hands, and it hangs today at the Musée d'Orsay.

Why it is in Mura

It is the picture on the front page of muratv.com, and one of the first most people see in the app. The reflection is the reason: on a screen the water reads as water from across the room and as paint from up close.