Claude Monet

In 1872 Renoir and Monet were two nearly broke young painters who worked side by side, often at Argenteuil on the Seine, propping each other up while almost no one would buy their pictures. This is Renoir's portrait of his friend, and it is a quiet, domestic thing. Instead of showing Monet at his easel, he catches him settled in with a pipe and a book, reading, so that early admirers simply called it The Reader. The loose, rapid brushwork is the shared language the two were building in these years, a little before they and their circle mounted the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and were mocked for it. Monet here is 31, with most of the water lilies still ahead of him.