La Vague verte

Monet went back to the Normandy coast in 1866 and 1867 and painted this from the sea itself, all greens and heaving blue with the sky squeezed into a thin band at the top. That high horizon and the flat, confident brushwork come straight out of Edouard Manet, whose paintings of American warships Monet had probably seen in Paris. When he finally showed the picture at the Impressionist exhibition of 1879, a critic said as much, calling it directly influenced by Manet. Monet himself later misremembered the date and marked it 1865. The little sailboats lean under the same wind that lifts the wave in the foreground.