Evening on the Seine

During his last creative period, Aleksander Gierymski (1850-1901) returned to mood paintings, concentrating on the artful use of colour harmony in his works. He abandoned genre scenes and instead chose landscape motifs as well as urban scenes, playing out in the early evening or night. He was fascinated by phenomena involving the play of light and colour with a narrow, low scale, requiring the use of a broad range of half- and quarter-tones depending on the degree of darkness and the intensity of the mist, by the effects of the play of light on moving surfaces of water, by reflections and gleams on the pavement of a street wet with rain. In Evening on the Seine, the artist shows a section of the river as dusk falls, with the Pont du Carrousel visible in the distance and the buildings of the Louvre looming on the banks. The waning light of the day is cut through by a faint glow in the upper sky, falling on the surface of the water and filtering through the mist which rises from the water. To portray the water, the artist has used the techniques of Divisionism, laying thin streaks of many hues of blue, grey and orange next to one another.