Jean Monet in seiner Wiege

Monet painted this in 1867, a year that nearly broke him. His family near Le Havre disapproved of his companion Camille Doncieux and had cut off his allowance, and when their son Jean was born that August, Monet was so short of money he could barely afford paint. The picture looks in on the sleeping infant in an oval cradle, a woman in a striped dress bent over him, everything softened by the pale flowered cloth draped around the crib. Nothing grand is being attempted, just a father recording his first child in the room where he slept. Jean would grow up to appear again and again in his father's work, running through poppy fields and posing in the garden at Argenteuil.