Madame Monet wearing a kimono

By 1876 Paris was in the grip of a craze for all things Japanese, which had poured in after the country opened to Western trade a few years earlier. Monet was badly short of money, and he made this enormous canvas to catch the fashion and sell high. His wife Camille modelled, wrapped in a borrowed red kimono against a wall of fans. Her own hair was dark, so he sat a blonde wig on her head, making sure no one mistook her for anything but a Frenchwoman playing dress-up. It went into the second Impressionist exhibition that spring alongside 18 other pictures of his. He later called the thing a piece of filth, made for the money, and the money did come. It sold for over 2,000 francs, several times what his quieter landscapes were fetching.