Woodgatherers at the Edge of the Forest

Monet was about 22 and still studying in Paris when he made this, and he painted it on a wooden panel close to a metre wide. People gathering wood make their way along the edge of a forest. The Museum of Fine Arts sets the picture beside the views of Normandy ports and beaches he was painting in the same years, where light already breaks into separate touches, the manner he would perfect much later. This inland scene is handled another way. The forms are simplified and the effects flattened, almost schematic. He put the colour down in choppy, broad strokes and set warm browns and greens against the blue of the sky, and the museum sees in this the boldly painted landscapes of earlier artists such as Gustave Courbet. He signed it at the lower right, C. Monet. Its early history is thin. It was with a Paris dealer at some point, in a New York collection by 1961, and then with Harold Kaplan of Boston, who gave it in 1968 to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. The Rose sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts, which entered it in its collection in 1974.