Deux femmes en barque

Figures had almost vanished from Monet's painting in the 1880s. In 1886 he put Suzanne Hoschedé on a rise above Giverny with a parasol, and the following summer he took the problem down to the water. An arm of the Epte ran along the bottom of his land, and through 1887 he painted Suzanne and her sister Blanche in a boat on it, again and again. They were the daughters of Alice Hoschedé, who kept his house and would marry him five years later. He told the critic Théodore Duret he wanted figures out of doors as he understood them, which in practice meant handling two young women the way he handled the cliffs at Étretat. The related canvases are now in Paris, Tokyo and São Paulo. This one stayed in private hands, and is known mostly by its number in the Wildenstein catalogue, 1150.