El parque Monceau

Monet painted this in the spring of 1878, in a fashionable park laid out like an English garden off the boulevard de Courcelles and ringed by the townhouses of wealthy Paris. The city was in a buoyant mood, hosting a World's Fair to show it had recovered from war and upheaval. Monet's own life was nothing like that. He was deep in debt, his wife Camille was ill, and within months he would leave Paris for the cheaper countryside. None of it shows. Dappled light falls across the lawn, and the strollers under the trees are barely more than upright flecks of colour, dropped in with a few quick touches of the brush.