Das Mittagessen

This is Monet's own garden at Argenteuil, the small town on the Seine where he lived through the early 1870s, some of the happiest and most productive years of his life. Lunch is over. Nobody is at the table. A cup sits half full, a hat hangs from a branch, a parasol lies forgotten on the bench, and his small son Jean plays alone in the shade. It is a big canvas, nearly life-size, and Monet meant it as a decorative panel for a wall, which is how he labelled it when he showed it at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. His friend and fellow painter Gustave Caillebotte later bought it, and it entered the French national collection through Caillebotte's bequest.