Pond at Montgeron

In the summer of 1876 the wealthy department-store owner Ernest Hoschede invited Monet to his country estate at Montgeron, south of Paris, to paint a set of large panels for a round salon. This pond, with its bank of trees and a lone figure fishing, was one of them. Within a year Hoschede had gone spectacularly bankrupt, the estate was sold, and the grand decorative scheme fell apart. Out of that collapse came one of the stranger turns in Monet's life, because his household and the ruined Hoschedes gradually merged, and years later Monet married Ernest's widow Alice. Made for a room that was about to be lost, the canvas keeps the loose, unfinished brushwork of a garden caught on an ordinary afternoon.