Маки близ Аржантёя

Monet painted this field in 1873, while living at Argenteuil just outside Paris, and the next spring he hung it in a show that he and his friends organised themselves after years of rejection by the official Salon. That 1874 exhibition, in a photographer's old studio, is the one a critic mocked with the word "impressionist", and the name stuck to all of them. The woman and child walking down through the poppies are almost certainly Monet's wife Camille and their son Jean, then six. Look closely and you will find a second pair higher up near the treeline, so the same walk seems to echo across the slope. The poppies themselves are barely flowers, just loose dabs of red laid over the green, exactly the handling the critics complained looked unfinished.