Étude de rochers, Creuse

In the spring of 1889 Monet shut himself away in the village of Fresselines, in the rocky heart of central France, and painted this stretch of the river Creuse over and over, some 24 canvases in a few weeks. He was chasing one motif under shifting light, the same discipline that would soon give him his haystacks and cathedrals. The subject here is a bare mass of rock rising where two branches of the river meet. Monet grew so frustrated as spring softened the valley that he had the budding leaves stripped from an oak to hold on to the winter scene he had begun. That June the finished pictures hung in Paris beside sculptures by Rodin, the two sharing a single exhibition. Sixty years later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother bought this one for her own collection.