In the summer of 1897, Claude Monet began a new series of paintings set around Giverny, Mornings on the Seine. The motif is a riverbank overhung with trees whose reflections shimmer on the moving water; the time is daybreak. Monet worked in a boat that he had equipped as a studio, accompanied by one of his gardeners, who handled the canvases-in-progress, putting one aside for another as the artist responded to changing light conditions.

Limiting his palette to a range of delicate, matte lavenders, ivories, and greens, Monet also restrained his brushwork. He established a hazy atmosphere that dissolves the outlines of forms, making it difficult to distinguish trees from their reflections. Like all the paintings in the series, Branch of the Seine near Giverny (Mist) is nearly square in shape, a format that allowed the artist to play with the concepts of symmetry and balance. For example the viewer intuitively understands the presence of a horizon line separating foreground from background, even though Monet did not delineate it in paint; one senses the horizontal axis of the canvas and interprets the cloudlike masses of tone accordingly.

Thus, Monet worked on two kinds of illusion, both of which would be central to his slightly later paintings of the water-lily pond at Giverny: the equivalence of object and reflection, and the tension between the two-dimensionality of the canvas and the three-dimensional space depicted on it. Looking back respectfully to the idyllic riverscapes of his celebrated predecessor Camille Corot, Monet—freeing his vision from naturalism and narrative—also pointed toward abstraction.