Vue de Vétheuil

Monet had moved his family to the village of Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, in 1878, at a low point. He was broke, and the following year his first wife, Camille, died there at 32. This bright view along the Seine toward the village church dates from 1880, as he was climbing back out. You can watch him changing as a painter: the brushwork quicker and more broken than in the 1870s, the colours turned pale and almost powdery, so that up close the tower, the boats and the figures dissolve into loose dabs of paint. Years later it became one of the first modern French pictures bought for a German national museum, when the Berlin director Hugo von Tschudi acquired it in Paris against considerable objection.