Impression, Sunrise

The dark verticals in the background are not masts. They are smokestacks and dock cranes in the working industrial port of Le Havre, France's second-largest port at the time of the painting. Monet was not painting nature; he was painting an active 19th- century shipyard at dawn. The sun is in fact the same luminance as the surrounding sky, so the chromatic punch is doing all the work, but the subject is the steel and coal economy of post- Haussmann France. Now at Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris @museemarmottanmonet