Beloved River

Before the war, antiquated river steamers puffed through the heart of Paris along the silent river Seine. On a lovely spring morning those who sat on deck beheld history unfold before their eyes. Between floating laundry barges, tall poplars, lines of motionless fishermen, they passed within a stone's throw of Daumier's house on the Ile St. Louis. Gliding under the great city's bridges, they threaded their way through the formal shadow of the Louvre, crept by the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, skirted the soft Bois de Boulogne, finally relinquished the monuments of men for those of nature as the steamer saluted the shores of La Grande Jatte, the island where bustled Parisian Mesdames once gathered for gaiety on sun-drenched meadows.

Such memories of the past were evoked last fortnight by a superb exhibition of 69 paintings at Manhattan's Wildenstein gallery. There fortunate Francophiles could travel, in three rooms, all the way from Paris to the sea. People who had never been to France could get a very good idea of what affected those who had.

The nostalgic journey started in the center of France's capital with the most beautiful canvas in the show, Honore Daumier's golden glimpse of a washerwoman ascending the steps from the river to the Quai d'Anjou, where the painter lived. A few hundred yards farther down the river, Paris' crowded Pont Neuf, the city's oldest bridge despite its name, was painted by Girtin, Renoir, Pissarro. A farewell was paid to Paris by several artists, among them the Dutchman Johann Barthold Jongkind, with a lovely view of Notre Dame towering over the river barges.

Outside the city, Painters Manet and Degas went horse racing at Longchamp, while Seurat settled himself down to immortalize La Grande Jatte with shimmering pictures of ladies taking the afternoon sun under the island's trees. In the town of St. Cloud, whose park reveals the most magnificent panorama of Paris, Paris-born Alfred Sisley painted one of his best, The Bridge at St. Cloud. In the tranquil village of Giverny, Claude Monet contemplated the ice and snow on the winter stream, and in summer the riot of purple irises and rare water lilies in his garden.

The peaceful Seine also drew foreigners. The self-mutilated genius Vincent Van Gogh, a Dutchman, painted the Seine's golden Bridge at Asnieres. From the U.S. came Painter Frank Boggs, from England (in 1817) the short-lived Bonington, who painted the exhibition's orange-tinted view of Mantes.

France's renowned Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot showed his study of the ruins of the 900-year-old Abbey at Jumieges, a Seine village a few miles beyond Normandy's ancient capital, Rouen. Celebrated for its churches, duck pate, sugar candy made of apples, and for the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, Rouen was the scene of paintings by Pissarro, Guillaumin, and Normandy's almost unknown but excellent Albert Lebourg, who died, paralyzed, at Rouen only 15 years ago. Lebourg's three paintings of the Seine near Rouen were infused with a diaphanous light suggesting England's Turner, for whom he had great admiration.

Between Rouen and Le Havre the Seine becomes so broad that ferryboats take the place of bridges. Wending its serpentine way through the Norman greenery, the river flows past the village of Villequier, once the home of Victor Hugo, begins to turn salty near Quillebeuf, painted by the seascapist Boudin. The exhibition, with six splendid Boudins including a glimpse of the beach at Trouville, ends with Corot's serene view of seaside Honfleur.

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