Valley of the Creuse (Gray Day)

Monet first came to the Creuse in February 1889 as a guest. The critic Gustave Geffroy took him for a few days to Fresselines, a village in the hills of central France, to visit the poet Maurice Rollinat, who had made his name reciting his dark verse to piano accompaniment at the Chat Noir cabaret in Paris and had then withdrawn there in 1883. The valley caught Monet. He came back alone in March and stayed into May, working on some two dozen canvases of the place where two branches of the river meet. The weather kept defeating him, and he wrote that he never had three good days in a row. This is one of the grey ones. The hills are modelled in deep purples, reds and blues, colour doing the work that shadow usually does. Monet signed it and dated it 89 at the lower left. In 1891 Durand-Ruel's New York branch sold it to Denman Ross, a Boston collector who taught design at Harvard, and he gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1906, one of the first Monets the museum owned.