Monet's Impression Sunrise vs. Cassatt's Boating Party

Introduction: Two Boats, Two Visions

The painting responsible for giving the Impressionist movement its name, Claude Monet's Impression Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant in the original French), is an important study of water and light, with water, sky, and silhouettes of ships providing the backdrop for the dark figures on a tiny boat in the foreground. A later Impressionist work, Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party, focuses once again on a small boat in the water, but in this later case nearly twenty years of artistic development have resulted in distinct stylistic differences in the representation of color, light, water, and even people. While Monet's influence is clearly visible in Cassatt's work, the differences offer the most interesting place for comparison. Analyzing the formal and contextual properties of each image before comparing and contrasting the two will reveal some of the historical developments of the intervening years.

Analyzing Monet's Impression Sunrise

Impression Sunrise is, as the title suggests, an image of a rising sun, though the sun itself remains low in the sky and is no brighter than the surrounding space — it is a distinct orange circle amidst the blue morning fog. The orange dot draws the viewer's eye before directing the gaze downward, first to the orange strokes representing the sun's reflection on the water's surface, and then to the noticeably dark form of a small boat carrying what appears to be at least two passengers making their way across the water.

While the precise direction the boat is heading remains unclear due to the indeterminate nature of the ripples in the water, a series of gradually disappearing rectangles of darker paint suggest the boat is heading northeast — into the fog and away from the viewer — because these disappearing rectangles appear to be other small boats preceding the central one. However, one may just as easily interpret these rectangles in precisely the opposite way: as boats following the central one out of the fog, or as representations of the central boat's passage through time, becoming indistinct as previous moments fade from memory.

Either way, the procession of small boats leads the viewer's gaze across the reflections on the water's surface and upward, back into the fog, where the masts of much larger ships can be seen growing out of the border where water meets sky, although the form of the actual ships remains indistinct. The strokes of the yellow sky curve to the left, giving the painting a sense of compression on one side and a subsequent opening on the other, such that the rightmost portion of the image is composed of nearly horizontal strokes — lending added weight to the interpretation that imagines the small boat moving through time from the left background to the right foreground, with the painting catching it precisely in the middle of its journey.

The title itself reveals important contextual considerations. Monet's choice to call the work an "Impression" of a sunrise signals the fundamentally novel elements of his style, marking a distinct shift from earlier modes of representation that favored more literal — though no less subjective — depictions of reality. In turn, this proposes to the viewer the possibility of a far more interpretive reception of the work, suggesting that the painting's meaning lies not in the precision of the scene depicted but in the emotional impression caused by the image as a whole. Ultimately, this contextual consideration helps illuminate the painting's meaning: it seems to be a reflection on the possibility of interpretation and on the beauty inherent in those moments where the solidity of reality has dissolved through the passage of time, yet the emotional impression nonetheless remains.

Analyzing Cassatt's The Boating Party

Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party demonstrates an evolution of the stylistic and narrative considerations visible in Impression Sunrise. Almost the entire lower-right half of the image is taken up by a small boat and the back of a man rowing it; the remainder consists of a woman and child riding in the boat, along with a sail and the water behind them. The boat appears to be heading away from the viewer, and both the woman and child gaze into the face of the rowing man, of whom only the slightest profile is visible. Both the woman's and child's expressions are indeterminate — they may be riding toward a picnic, away from a funeral, or even caught in the midst of a kidnapping. These somewhat ominous interpretations are compounded by the striking difference in color: the woman, child, and boat are all brightly colored and distinctly patterned, whereas the man is a large mass of dark blues, with texture visible only in the folds of his clothing, and "is pressed against the picture plane and cast in silhouette by the sail's shadow" (Picturing America 62).

The formal properties of the image also reveal contextual considerations necessary for understanding it. The divisions between objects and lines are far clearer than in Monet's work, representing a move back toward a more literal representation of reality — one that is nonetheless impressionistic, as seen most clearly in the brushstrokes of the water. Following the rise of Impressionism, The Boating Party may be understood as the necessary evolution and cross-breeding of the style with other modes of representation over the course of the intervening twenty years.

Conclusion

Taken together, Impression Sunrise and The Boating Party chart nearly two decades of development within the Impressionist tradition. Monet's work inaugurated a new mode of seeing — one rooted in emotional impression rather than precise representation — while Cassatt's later painting demonstrates how those innovations were absorbed, refined, and recombined with more traditional figurative approaches. The shared motif of the small boat on water serves as a productive point of comparison, revealing how two artists working within the same broad movement could arrive at strikingly different visions of perception, light, and human experience.

Works Cited

Cassatt, Mary. The Boating Party. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. Wikipedia.org. 20 June 2011. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Cassatt_002.jpg

Monet, Claude. Impression Sunrise. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Wikipedia.org. 20 June 2011. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet,_Impression,_soleil_levant,_1872.jpg

"The Boating Party." Picturing America Resource Guide. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC. NEH.gov. 20 June 2011. Retrieved from http://picturingamerica.neh.gov/downloads/pdfs/Resource_Guide_Chapters/PictAmer_Resource_Book_Chapter_14A.pdf