Boating Party

Boating Party (1886) by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, now in the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a marine subject reflecting the 19th-century tradition of coastal painting as both documentary record and atmospheric study of light on water. Adolphe Monticelli was a Marseille-born painter whose wildly impastoed late Romantic figure scenes exercised a powerful influence on Van Gogh, who collected his work and explicitly modeled certain paintings on Monticelli's technique. Working in the tradition of Watteau's fête galante — elegantly dressed figures in park settings — but treating them with an almost expressionist freedom of color and surface.

Monticelli applied paint with extraordinary impasto thickness — sometimes inches deep — building richly encrusted surfaces that transform his romantic fête galante subjects into glittering tapestries of color.