MURA · THE COLLECTION · PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Regatta at Argenteuil

Regatta at Argenteuil is a small oil painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1874, showing sailing boats on the Seine at Argenteuil, the town on the Seine where he and Claude Monet painted together. It measures 32.4 by 45.7 centimetres and belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, accession number 1970.17.59.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1874 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

White sails catch the light above a river alive with small strokes of blue, yellow and green. The Commons record describes a regatta on the Seine at Argenteuil with sailboats in a landscape composition typical of Renoir's Impressionist years. The gallery's open data gives the medium as oil on canvas and the framed size as 55.6 by 71.4 centimetres.

How it was painted

Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841. He met Monet in 1862 in the Paris studio of Charles Gleyre, and the two worked side by side in the years that followed; Wikipedia records that in the early 1870s Renoir painted alongside Monet at Argenteuil, where they worked out of doors on the same motifs and pursued their observations of light and shadow. In April 1874, the year of this canvas, Renoir joined Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and others in mounting the first Impressionist exhibition, to which he sent six pictures.

Where it went

The gallery's provenance begins in Monet's own collection: the painting belonged to Monet and then to Madame Jean Monet, born Blanche Hoschedé. It may have passed through the Galerie Charpentier in Paris in 1945, and by 1952 it was owned by Captain Edward H. Molyneux in Paris, whose collection was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art that year. Molyneux sold it on 15 August 1955 to Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and it came to the gallery with her bequest in 1970 as part of the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection. The gallery has released the image under a CC0 dedication, and the reproduction here is that file as published on Wikimedia Commons, which links to the gallery's object record 52203.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Impressionist Life collection with a luminous mood: a small, quick picture of sails and water from the summer the Impressionists first showed together.