Claude Monet Reading

Renoir painted this around 1872, when he and Claude Monet were often at work in the same rooms and along the same riverbank at Argenteuil, just outside Paris. Both men were poor, largely unsold, and still a couple of years from the 1874 group show that would earn them the mocking nickname Impressionists. So this is one working painter looking at another off duty. Monet sits with a pipe, absorbed in a newspaper, his red-brown beard and cap loosely brushed in the quick, unfinished manner both friends were then defending. Renoir kept the picture for himself. It hangs today in the Marmottan, the Paris museum richest in Monet's own work.