Interior, after Dinner

The winter of 1868 found Monet broke but briefly settled. A patron from Le Havre was paying his bills, and he had taken a house on the Normandy coast with Camille, soon to be his wife, and their baby son. There he painted something unusual for him, an indoor scene after dark. Two figures sit by the fire under the yellow wash of an oil lamp hung from the ceiling, and a large mirror over the mantel catches the backs of their heads, a lidded vase, and a clock we cannot otherwise see. Monet almost never worked this way, inside and at night, away from the changing daylight he spent his life chasing. He signed it in red in the lower left corner.