Walk near Argenteuil

On 24 March 1875 Monet and three friends put 73 paintings up for auction at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. The room heckled, the prices were miserable, and the police were called in. Monet was living at Argenteuil then, a river town a few miles down the Seine from Paris, and this walk through the flowering plain nearby was painted in the same year, with his wife Camille and their son Jean as the two figures. He was borrowing steadily by then, from Manet and from the painter Gustave Caillebotte, a friend with money. Camille fell ill within two years and died in 1879, at 32. The plain itself, between Colombes and Gennevilliers, was built over long ago.