ABSTRACT
Claude Monet, the greatest of Impressionist landscape painters, reveals the dichotomy of city and country in many aspects of his rich and varied work. Monet's paintings there give witness to the complicated pattern of change in a region that was indeed 'nature' and which lent itself to 'landscape,' but one which was neither Paris itself nor the relatively untouched villages favoured by Charles Daubigny. Daubigny's prints and illustrations include a number that deal with the industrialization of the countryside. Daubigny hardly ever painted the steamboats along the Seine and the Oise, although French people know that they were so common as to inspire the hatred of riverside innkeepers, ferrymen and towpath workers, rapidly being done out of their livelihood. Daubigny's paintings are the chief witnesses to this retention of a pastoral ideal, but occasionally his letters are especially revealing. In his Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, Monet reveals his unstated ambition to be the painter of modern landscape.
