L’uomo con l’ombrellino

In the mid-1860s Monet was in his twenties and usually short of money, painting out in the open while most studio painters around him still assembled their pictures indoors from sketches. Here he set a single man against almost nothing but sky, seen slightly from below, umbrella raised, so the figure pushes up into the light of an overcast day. No anecdote is being told. The dark coat and the pale grey air are laid down at nearly the same quick speed, as if the whole thing were caught in one glance. That word, impression, would only become the name of a movement about a decade later, when a Paris critic borrowed it to mock a different Monet canvas. You can already see the habit forming here in the wet, hurried strokes of the grass.