Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist's Garden in Argenteuil

The title says only a child. Monet's son Jean was about eight that summer, and the museum does not name the little one sitting on the path. The woman is his wife Camille, in the garden of the house the family rented at Argenteuil, the river town just outside Paris. The Museum of Fine Arts looks at how the brilliance of a sunny day is made here, from shimmering reds, blues, greens and white laid down in many small strokes. The strokes change shape with what they describe, so that the flowers, the grass and the clothes each get a texture of their own. Monet signed the canvas at the lower left and added 75. The standard catalogue of his work suggests, with some doubt, that he sold it that October to Clément Courtois of Mulhouse, an Alsatian textile city that had belonged to the German Empire since 1871. In 1927 the picture was auctioned in New York, where Edwin and Jane Webster of Newton, near Boston, paid 12,000 dollars for it. A member of their family gave it to the museum anonymously at the end of 1976.