Michel Monet with a Pompon

In the winter of 1879 the Seine at Vétheuil froze over, and when the ice broke up in January 1880 Monet went down to the river and painted the drifting floes again and again. At home things were harder. His wife Camille had died that September, leaving him with two sons, and the family now shared a house with Alice Hoschedé and her six children, with little money to go round. The younger boy, Michel, turned two in March 1880, and this is him that year, in a dark hat with a pompom, painted on a small canvas. Michel lived until 1966. After his death that year, the works by his father still kept in the family passed to the Musée Marmottan, which is how this museum came to hold the largest collection of Monet's paintings anywhere.