Flower Beds at Vétheuil

In 1880 a journalist named Émile Taboureux came out to Vétheuil to write about Monet and asked if he might see the studio. Monet told him he had never had one. He could not understand, he said, how anyone could shut themselves up in a room, to draw perhaps, but not to paint. This canvas shows the sort of place he worked instead. Vétheuil is a village on the Seine west of Paris, where Monet had moved in 1878, and the house he rented there came with a garden on the riverbank that he could cultivate himself. Here he painted its flower beds, and the Museum of Fine Arts points to the climbing nasturtiums, set down in swirls and splashes of orange. The canvas stands upright, a little over 90 centimetres tall, and it is signed at the lower left with the year, 81. Monet sold it to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, though the records disagree about when. The catalogue of his work gives December 1881, and notes in the museum's own files give 1891.