The Creuse valley, sparsely populated although rich in lore and visual beauty, is well know for its rugged terrain and rock quarries. The critic who championed Monet's work in the 1880s, Gustave Geffroy, introduced the artist to this landscape in the heart of France which was the setting for many stories by Georges Sand, who found "the supple and subtle folds in the landscape...infinitely satisfying."

In 1889, based in the village of Fresselines, Monet embarked on what was to become his first "series", views of the same landscape at different times of day and in different weathers. He completed twenty-four canvases in this campaign, and the Whittemore painting constitutes one of ten of the confluence between the Petite Creuse and the Grande Creuse, a spot that epitomized for Monet what he described as the "awesome wildness of the place."

Monet was drawn to this area for the same reason as he painted
Belle-Ile. "Here I am again in a remote land," he told Berthe Morisot, "It's superb, with a real savagery that reminds me of Belle-Ile."

Commenting on this group of formidable images that express the raw power and beauty of terrain in which no trace of man existed, Paul Hayes Tucker observed:

The Creuse paintings speak about certain fundamentals
of art and nature in even stronger language than any previous
group of paintings...one senses them in many aspects of
the series, particularly in the conjuncture of the natural
elements in the sites--the two rivers flowing into each
other, the conjoined river pushing into the hills and
plowing still deeper into the earth, the hills themselves
reaching toward each other as if trying to be reunited. They
can also be felt in the contrasting shapes of those natural
forms--the bulbous hills, the triangular river, the elongated
rectangle of sky--and how they react. Indeed, from where
Monet chose to paint these pictures of the confluence, the
water becomes a wedge that drives into the hills, forcing
apart, and effectively causing them to rise....These
subtleties contribute to the sense of elemental in these
paintings, a quality that Monet felt deeply, as is evident
not only in the relationships he establishes in them, but
also in the extraordinary palette, the vigorous brushwork,
and the grandeur he captures in the other views of the site.
(P.H. Tucker, exh. cat., Monet in the 90's: The Series Paintings , Boston, 1989, pp. 42-46)

One other of the ten from this series shares the same time of day as the Whittemore painting (Wildenstein no. 1226, Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar) although in it the sun has only begun to set and the sky is imbued with relatively delicate hues of pink and yellow. In strong contrast, this work emphasizes the brooding drama of the disappearing sun which throws rich blues and purples onto the massive cliffs and emphasizes the burnished sky and last-light scudding clouds.

This work has been in the hands of the same family for one hundred and two years after being purchased by Harris Whittemore, a Connecticut industrialist introduced to Impressionist painting by Mary Cassatt while on his honeymoon in Paris. One of the American families that pioneered the acquisition of major works by Monet, Degas and others, a sale of paintings from the Collection of Harris Whittemore took place at Christie's in New York on Nov. 12, 1985.