The apple tree

Monet moved to Vétheuil, a village on the Seine about 60 kilometres below Paris, in the autumn of 1878, largely because he could no longer afford Argenteuil. Two families shared the house, his own and that of Ernest Hoschedé, a Paris store owner who had gone bankrupt after buying a great deal of Impressionist painting. Eight children between them. Monet spent the spring of 1879 at the foot of the hill at Chantemesle, working on the fruit trees as they came into blossom, and this is one of those, an apple tree against a sky full of moving cloud. His wife Camille was ill through all of it and died that September, aged 32. The canvas passed through Paris, Berlin and New York in private hands for well over a century before joining the Hasso Plattner collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.