Les Lilas au soleil

In the spring of the early 1870s, in the garden of his rented house at Argenteuil outside Paris, Monet set his easel in front of a lilac bush and painted the people resting under it in full sunshine. Then he painted the very same spot again beneath a grey, overcast sky. Standing in one place and recording how the light changed the same subject was an unusual thing to do, and these two lilac canvases are often called the first hint of what he would take up in earnest years later, when he painted haystacks, poplars, and the front of Rouen cathedral over and over at different hours. Here the sunlit figures nearly dissolve into the flicker of light, half lost among the blossom and the shade.