Vista de Rouelles, El Havre

This is the earliest painting we have by Monet, made in 1858 when he was seventeen and still known around Le Havre as a sharp caricaturist. That summer the older local painter Eugene Boudin took him out to the Rouelles valley near the town and set up to work in the open air. Monet, watching him, painted this small green landscape of a stream and trees under a wide sky. Boudin's push to paint outdoors, in front of the thing itself, stuck for the rest of Monet's long life. He signed it O. Monet, for Oscar-Claude, the first name he would soon drop. A few weeks later he sent it to an exhibition in Le Havre, and it was accepted.