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Rachel Cohen

Jongkind: A River in Summer

Johan Jongkind, The Seine at Bas-Meudon, 1865. Cleveland Museum of Art. Detail photos Rachel Cohen.

We are visiting family in Cleveland. The Cleveland Museum of Art will be one of the first to reopen, on June 30th. Ordinarily, we would go there.

This is a painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection by Johan Jongkind (1819-1891), a painter from the Netherlands, not always given his due by those who write about the Impressionists.

Jongkind used to paint en plein air with Claude Monet.

Monet said of Jongkind, "it was to him that I owe the final education of my eye."

Today we went for a walk by the Cuyahoga River. Once famously polluted, the river walk now has beautiful slopes of flowering grasses under the great bridges. We saw yellow finches, a heron.