Self-portrait in Beret

In April 1886 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel shipped almost 300 Impressionist pictures to New York and sold 49 of them, which is roughly the moment the Impressionists stopped being a Paris quarrel and became a market. Monet told him he regretted seeing some of his canvases sent off to, as he put it, the land of the Yankees. Later that same month he left for Holland to paint the tulip fields, spent the autumn on the cliffs of Belle-Île, and at 45 painted himself, which he almost never did. Only two self-portraits are now accepted as his. This one, and the one he made in 1917 for his friend Georges Clemenceau, soon to be prime minister of France, which is in the Musée d'Orsay. A third, long shown at the Musée Marmottan in Paris, was reassigned in 2020 to the Swiss painter Charles Giron.