The Rue de la Bavolle at Honfleur

Monet was 23 when he painted this street, and he spent most of 1864 in Honfleur, the old port on the Normandy side of the Seine estuary. Charles Gleyre had shut the Paris studio where Monet was studying, so he went to the coast with his friend Frédéric Bazille. Bazille soon went back to Paris. Monet stayed on into the autumn, working near two older painters who knew the place well, Eugène Boudin, who was born in Honfleur, and the Dutchman Johan Barthold Jongkind.

The rue de la Bavolle is a narrow lane. He painted it twice, almost identically, and the other version is in Boston. This one is just over 60 centimetres across, an ordinary early afternoon with the houses on one side in full sun and the other side dropped into deep shadow.

One of the two shows up on a wall three years later, in Bazille's painting of his own Paris studio on the rue Visconti.