Vetheuil in the Fog

Monet painted this the year everything was going wrong. He had moved his family out to the village of Vetheuil on the Seine to save money, and by 1879 his wife Camille was fatally ill; she died there that September. The canvas is nearly emptied out, the town and the water dissolved into a pale silver haze with only a few strokes of colour. When Monet offered it to the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, one of the first collectors to back the Impressionists, Faure turned it down, complaining there was not enough paint on the canvas. Monet kept it anyway and held on to it for the rest of his life. It reached the Marmottan only decades later, through the collection his son Michel left the museum.