Monet's serene composition dates from the onset of Impressionism, when artists began to use pure colors, applied directly to the canvas. Here, the artist, the true innovator and leader of the movement, is obviously fascinated with life, with nature, with the sense of the breeze and the dazzling effects of sunlight and shadow. These are rendered in broad strokes, forming patterns of colored shapes. All of this announces a new era of landscape painting.

In this expansive view, there is a deliberate tension between the illusion of space and the flatness of the canvas. Because of the raised viewpoint from which the picture is painted—he was looking out of a second story window of the house—the garden, the sea, and the sky seem to become three distinct, horizontal bands within the composition, rather than receding into the distance. Monet borrowed this flattened perspective from Japanese woodblock prints, which he admired and collected, like many of his fellow artists. The flagpoles tie these three sections together even more closely. Throughout his career, in paintings that captured exquisite nuances of light and color, Monet explored the tension between the illusion of depth and flatness. His bold innovations would have a profound influence on the language and ideas of painting in that century and the next.

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