Woman in the Garden

Monet was 26 when he painted this in the summer of 1867, and nearly broke. His mistress Camille was pregnant, his father was pressing him, and he had retreated to his family's holdings on the Normandy coast at Sainte-Adresse. The woman crossing the sunlit garden is Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre, the wife of a well-off cousin whose hospitality he was leaning on. It predates the Impressionism he would become famous for, and it looks it: the drawing is careful, the flowerbeds crisp, the light bright and even rather than broken into flecks. X-rays show he reused the canvas, painting over an earlier work, the kind of economy a painter with no money practised. It ended up in Russia and hangs today in the Hermitage.