The Luncheon

Monet painted this in 1868, at one of the lowest points of his life. He was broke and dodging creditors, staying afloat only because a patron had taken his young family in near the Normandy coast. Out of that precarious winter he produced something oddly grand. He gave an ordinary family lunch the size and ambition of a history painting, well over two metres tall. His companion Camille and their small son Jean sit at the table, an empty chair in front waiting for the painter himself, a servant slipping out at the side. Two years later he offered it to the Paris Salon, the official exhibition that could make a career, and the jury turned it down as too plain and too big for so ordinary a subject.