Lillà, tempo grigio

In the spring of 1872, newly settled in a rented house at Argenteuil just downstream from Paris, Monet set up his easel in his own garden and painted the flowering lilacs twice from the very same spot. One canvas he made under a clear sky, this one under a grey, overcast one, the light flattened and the figures resting in the shade almost dissolving into the leaves. Look closely and you can barely count them among the branches. It was one of the first times he deliberately worked the same motif in changing weather just to see what the light would do. Ten years on, that habit would become his method, the haystacks and cathedrals painted over and over. Here it is still just a quiet afternoon under the blossom.