Boats under Construction

Two pale boat hulls rise above a clutter of timber, ladders and angled supports in Berthe Morisot’s Boats under Construction. The harbour lies beyond them, glimpsed through the crowded framework of a working yard. Painted in 1874, this small oil on canvas belongs to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. Its French title is Bateaux en construction, and its dimensions are just 32 × 41 centimetres: a compact picture in which the boats seem almost to tower over us.^[1]

Morisot painted the scene at Fécamp on the Normandy coast. Here the vessels have the presence of buildings, while the small people beneath them supply a measure of their size. The picture draws attention to the physical world that makes a harbour possible: hulls standing clear of the water, heavy wood on the ground and a dense network of temporary structures.^[2]

Looking into the boatyard

The foreground is a place to work through with the eye. A long, irregular piece of timber runs across the lower part of the canvas, its pale cut surfaces and darker bark-like edges picking up different colours. Smaller pieces and dark curved forms lie further back. Beyond this low barrier, upright posts and diagonal timbers surround the two large hulls. Little stretches of ground remain visible between the obstacles, giving the scene depth without opening a broad path into it.

The left-hand vessel presses close to the edge of the picture. Its pale surface is interrupted by a dark opening near the top, and tall poles cross above it. A ladder and several sloping supports strengthen the triangular pattern around its base. The vessel to the right is more rounded in outline and set a little further back. Its yellowish surface catches the light above a tangle of dark timber. Morisot makes these two great forms distinct while binding them together through repeated colours and surrounding diagonals.

A narrow interval between the hulls lets the gaze travel towards water, buildings and more distant boats. Masts rise above this middle distance. A low green ridge stretches behind the harbour, and the grey-blue sky fills the upper part of the scene. The movement from heavy foreground objects to thin, distant uprights is especially effective: the viewer feels the weight of the nearby boats before noticing how lightly the remote harbour is indicated.

The composition therefore offers several scales at once. The large hulls occupy much of the height of the canvas; the figures below them are tiny. Houses and boats in the distance shrink further. Yet Morisot has not arranged these elements as a tidy succession of separate bands. The supports overlap the water and buildings, and the masts connect the busy middle distance to the sky. A working environment becomes an interlocking structure of lines, masses and glimpses.

Fécamp and the material life of a harbour

Fécamp gives the painting a specific geographical setting. In its 2024 exhibition Photographier en Normandie, the Musée d’art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre placed Morisot’s shipyard alongside nineteenth-century photographs of Norman ports. The accompanying essay draws attention to the timber accumulated in the yards she painted and to Charles Gombert’s photographs of the masts filling Fécamp’s basins. It is a useful context for the wood spread across her foreground: this is a landscape shaped by maritime work.^[11]

That same exhibition reproduced Gombert’s panoramic view of the bassin Bérigny, made around 1867, near Morisot’s painting. The juxtaposition invites a comparison between an encompassing view of a port and the painter’s close approach to the yard. Morisot gives particular force to things immediately in front of her. The elevated hulls interrupt the view, and the timber announces the ground as a place of manufacture. The catalogue pairing does not establish that she used Gombert’s photograph as a source.^[11]

There is much to recognise here without turning the picture into a technical diagram. The title identifies boats being constructed, and the ladders and supports make their setting legible. The precise jobs of the small figures, however, remain indistinct. Their marks of blue, white and dark paint bring human activity into the scene without becoming individual portraits. A light patch can suggest a shirt; a dark stroke can establish a body beside a great hull. Their visual role is clear even where their immediate actions are difficult to read.

This balance matters. A viewer can attend to labour and materials while also following Morisot’s decisions as a painter. She gives a piece of wood an emphatic sweep across the foreground, uses a ladder to carry the eye upward and lets a cluster of dark supports make a pale hull appear brighter. The yard supplies both the subject and the means of organising the picture.

A Normandy summer in 1874

The date places Boats under Construction in a decisive year. Morisot participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1874, having already established a public career through the Salon from 1864. The Musée d’Orsay’s chronology then places her at Fécamp during the summer, painting with Eugène Manet, whom she married in December. The older catalogue likewise associates this boatyard picture with their engagement.^[2][12]

That chronology gives the scene a place in her life without explaining away its subject. The boats and timber do not require a romantic interpretation because she was engaged. They show how attentively she looked at an environment available during the visit. Her summer setting included a harbour whose practical structures could command a canvas as fully as a terrace, a garden or a familiar sitter.

The Orsay exhibition essay also identifies Fécamp among the coastal places in which Morisot developed her painting outdoors during the 1870s. It describes these settings as opportunities for pictorial experiment as well as places within the social world she inhabited.^[12] In this picture the experiment involves fitting tall vessels and a complicated array of overlapping objects into a modest horizontal rectangle. Its dimensions encourage close looking, but the hulls themselves feel large.

Seen in this context, the work expands an account of Morisot centred on domestic interiors. The harbour was part of her contemporary world, and she could respond to its timber structures and rigging with the same sensitivity to light and spatial relationships that distinguishes her figure paintings. The human presence is dispersed through the yard rather than concentrated in a principal sitter.

Light, colour and the rhythm of the supports

The pale yellow and cream of the hulls provide the strongest sustained areas of light. Around them, brown-black posts and braces create sharp accents. Many of these dark marks lean, so that the eye keeps travelling across the scene. Their directions converge and separate: one set draws attention to the left vessel, another frames the right, and thinner uprights continue towards the distant harbour.

Morisot gives the sky a different kind of movement. Broad grey and blue strokes lie across its surface, with lighter patches opening between them. It looks clouded, but the represented sky does not establish the weather throughout the painting’s execution. What matters pictorially is the relationship between this cool upper space and the warmer boats. Their light surfaces remain luminous within the subdued colour scheme.

The ground carries a wider mixture of colour than a first glance might suggest. Grey passages sit beside ochres, browns and occasional lighter touches. The long foreground timber gathers several of these tones together, making it both a substantial object and a link between the large hulls and the lower edge. Small blue and white accents around the figures animate the darker area beneath the right-hand boat. They are strong enough to be noticed without breaking the dominance of the vessels.

At close range, the paint varies according to the task. Fine strokes establish masts and rigging; broader touches describe the bulk of a hull or the irregular surface of wood. Distant buildings receive enough light and dark to suggest their arrangement, while nearby supports have stronger edges. The result depends on selective clarity. Morisot can make the yard feel crowded without defining every object equally, and she can preserve a coherent view while allowing many individual marks to remain visible.

Other coasts, other viewpoints

Morisot’s harbour paintings reward comparison because she repeatedly changes the viewer’s relationship to the water. The earlier Harbour at Lorient, dated 1869, and the Isle of Wight harbour view of 1875 belong to different visits and different compositions. The Orsay catalogue identifies them separately as the Lorient marine and a view of the Solent.^[12] Fécamp’s timber-filled foreground has its own place between these coastal works.

A further change occurs in Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight, painted in 1875 during the couple’s English honeymoon. The Marmottan museum identifies its setting as Globe Cottage at Cowes: Eugène stands beside a window through which the garden and quays can be seen.^[7] The window organises that painting’s access to the harbour. In Boats under Construction, the enclosing lines belong to the yard itself. Posts, ladders and braces divide the view, and the boats stand between the viewer and the water.

This comparison helps explain what is distinctive about the Fécamp canvas. Morisot is interested in more than the appearance of distant shipping. She brings the viewer into a space where vessels are physical objects resting above the ground. Water remains present, but it is reached through a succession of structures. The harbour can be experienced from an interior, from its edge or from the working ground beside it; each position offers a different painting.

Exhibitions and the Marmottan collection

The 1961 catalogue records Boats under Construction at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Its later exhibition history includes appearances in 1902, 1929 and 1941, followed by Copenhagen in 1949, London in 1950 and Dieppe in 1957.^[2] These records show a small coastal painting continuing to circulate through exhibitions well beyond Morisot’s lifetime. They also place her harbour subject within the public presentation of her work, alongside the figure paintings for which she is more widely known.

Today the painting forms part of the Musée Marmottan Monet’s Morisot holdings through the bequest of Annie Rouart.^[1] The museum explains that descendants of the artist deliberately brought together a major body of her work there, encompassing landscapes, coastal scenes, gardens, portraits and works on paper.^[13] That breadth gives Boats under Construction a valuable setting. It can be understood within an artist’s varied practice, with its own demands of viewpoint, scale and colour.

Its particular strength emerges when the eye returns to the foreground. The long timber seems almost close enough to obstruct our way, yet the fine masts beyond it belong to a much larger harbour. Between those distances Morisot holds the two great pale hulls, surrounded by restless dark lines. A small canvas accommodates the weight of vessels, the presence of people and the changing textures of a working coast.