Giardino delle Tuileries

Monet painted this looking down over the Tuileries garden from the apartment of the collector Victor Chocquet, high up at 198 rue de Rivoli. That was around 1876, though Monet signed and dated it 1875. At the eastern end of the garden stood the burnt shell of the Tuileries Palace, set alight during the Commune fighting of May 1871 and left standing as a ruin until the state finally had it cleared in 1883. He made two studies from that window. Gustave Caillebotte, a painter with money who bought his friends' work, acquired this one from Monet in May 1877, and it was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition that year. It came to the French state in 1896 through Caillebotte's bequest, after two years of argument about whether the national museums wanted the pictures at all.