Corner of the Garden at Montgeron

In the summer of 1876 Monet was a guest at the chateau de Rottembourg in Montgeron, south of Paris, the country home of Ernest Hoschede, a wealthy department-store owner who loved the new painting. Hoschede asked him to make four large canvases to decorate a round drawing room, and this flowering corner by the pond, with its rose bushes and a small figure among the beds, was one of them. Within a year Hoschede was bankrupt, the chateau was sold, and he never took delivery of the pictures. The two families later shared a household, and after Monet's first wife died he eventually married Hoschede's widow, Alice. This panel passed through Russian collections and hangs now in Saint Petersburg.