Sommer

The word Impressionism was barely a few months old when Monet painted this. It came from a mocking review of the group's first show in the spring of 1874, taken from the title of one of his own canvases, and it was meant as an insult. That same summer Monet was at Argenteuil, just downriver from Paris, laying down grass and heat-blurred trees in short, thin, separate strokes of colour, exactly the loose handling the critics had ridiculed. A woman sits in the cool shade of the foreground while the fields behind her bake in the light. When the picture was shown two years later, the novelist Émile Zola singled it out for particular praise.