Apartment Corner

In June 1874 Monet moved his family to a house on the boulevard Saint-Denis in Argenteuil, a river town just outside Paris, and this is a room inside it. He framed the view like a stage set. Patterned hangings and green plants stand on both sides, with blue-and-white pots that turn up in other pictures of his, and the herringbone parquet runs straight down the middle toward a bright window. His son Jean, born in 1867, stands against the light, and his reflection falls on the polished floor. At the round table on the left, half lost in shadow, sits a figure the Musée d'Orsay takes to be his wife Camille. The family stayed in that house until January 1878. Writing in 1894, the critic Gustave Geffroy said that what Monet studied in this interior above all was the way air and light came in.