Still Life with a Piece of Meat

This is Monet at 23 or 24, in 1864, years before anyone spoke of Impressionism. There is no shimmering water and no open air, just a raw cut of beef laid on a cloth against a dark ground. He was painting in the sober realist manner then in fashion, the manner of Chardin a century earlier and of his own contemporaries like Ribot, all brown shadow and careful weight. It was the kind of studio exercise a young painter did to prove he could handle paint and tone. Within a few years he had walked out of the studio for good, chasing daylight and water on the Seine at Argenteuil.