why monet gave up figure painting

Why Monet Gave up Figure PaintingAuthor(s): Anne M. WagnerSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 612-629Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046059 .

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Why Monet Gave Up Figure Painting Anne M. Wagner

Why did Monet give up figure painting? Why does it matter?

My essay attempts to answer these questions at some length, and with as much precision as could reasonably be expected from any effort at causal explanation which admits from the outset the problematic nature of its task. We shall never

"really know" why Monet gave up figure painting, and indeed it might well be claimed he never did so, if "figure painting" means representing men, women, and children in oils. But if by figure painting is meant an investment in a

particular practice of representation established in the Paris Salons of the 1860s and 1870s, bounded on the one hand by works of Manet and Courbet, on the other by Stevens and Cabanel; if figure painting names, in other words, the

practice which in these years best indexed the ambitions of the painter's relationship to innovation and tradition and

contemporaneity, then Monet's scattered later exercises at

figures-from LaJaponaise (1876) to the two Essais de figure en plein air of 1886 (better known as the Femmes a" l'ombrelle-do not stand for any kind of continuity with it.1 When on occasions like these Monet returned to the figure, regression seems mostly to have been the order of the day, even when it took pictorially innovative form. The tone of the later figure paintings may be elegaic or haunted, nostalgic or

merely (intentionally?) vacuous, but in any case they had become in every sense secondary to Monet's landscape work.

I mean to argue that Monet gave up figure painting as the vehicle and measure of his contribution to a modern painting not-or at least not simply-because he "preferred" landscape, but because figure painting, as he conceived its demands, was an activity ultimately emotionally intolerable to him; it was overdetermined from the start, since it involved a difficult positioning of himself as subject in relation to the fiction of reality represented with such studied urgency in his

pictures. Monet, I will claim, gave up figure painting because he could not continue successfully to accommodate the emotional conflicts aroused by the discrepancies between the rhetoric of modern life offered in his pictures, and the

subjective materials from which they were confected. That failure at accommodation matters-it is more than, or not

merely, a personal failure-because it provides evidence, at a site where it is still needed, of the artificiality and volatility of "the modern" as a term to name both a category of

experience and a category of representation. Its unsustain-

ability in Monet's case is decisive for representation; it is decisive, in other words, for the account of subjectivity and sociability offered within these works; they are images whose implications ultimately leave behind the welter of evidence concerning their making which is offered here-despite the key role that evidence plays in generating this account. The Monet who made his pictures, in other words, and the one produced by and within them are not identical.

My propositions read rather baldly, I realize, and may appear more ambitious than seems justifiable, given their necessarily speculative grounds. After all, the ultimate confir- mation of an argument concerning emotional conflicts experienced by Monet would be his acceptance of its terms; failing that, my readers' acceptance will have to suffice. And they will accept or reject what is unabashedly argument; I have only a few new bits of information to offer in my support, though offer them I will in due course. The main burden of my effort here will instead go toward a rereading of published sources and familiar pictures-an effort launched, needless to say, out of disagreements to be located (without yet citing chapter and verse) in the general reductive- ness and imprecision of other authors, especially as concerns the inevitable points of overlap and disjunction between Monet's purposes as a painter and his identity as a person. I aim, for my part, to offer an account which will put under-

standing of both "purposes" and "identity" under a certain stress.

It is not simply in the effort to avoid the failings of my predecessors that my argument is built around the study of a

single picture, Le De'jeuner [The Luncheon] (1868-69; Figs. 1-3), a work which offers the viewer the father's seat at a

bourgeois family meal.2 The painting effectively marks the final point of Monet's engagement with "figure painting" as a specially ambitious practice, the termination of preoccupa- tions of five years' standing. This is not to say that the picture itself was then disowned by its maker: he could not have afforded its loss. Though he held it back from the Salon of 1869 (the Salon for which it was first conceived), he sent it

along in 1870, took it home again when it was refused, and, evidently hopeful that the naure of his accomplishment- would be apparent in another, more venturesome context,

This study is a revised version of an essay which, though completed in 1988, is only now being published. My thanks to Kaja Silverman, as well as the two anonymous Art Bulletin reviewers, for com- ments that aided in the revision. Translations from the French are mine. 1. Wildenstein's five-volume catalogue of Monet's work makes possible a more or less global view of its character and focus through the years. Wildenstein has catalogued 2,044 paintings by Monet (drawings and pastels both form categories enumerated sepa-

rately from paintings). Of the more than 1,330 of these which the artist painted after 1881, 8 are portraits and 7 might be classified as figure paintings (an eighth is a study for one of the latter). Between 1858 and 1881, by contrast, some 27 portraits and 36 figure paintings can be counted. These statistics are somewhat approximate because Monet's particular conception of these genres make their boundaries difficult to police. Note further that the accustomed content of each-the familiar use of the portrait or figure painting to render

individuality or sociability-is increasingly evacu- ated in favor of a brand of landscape with figures: people inhabit Monet's landscapes the way cows dwell in Barbizon vistas; banished to the edges or background, they are largely anonymous occupants of scenes given over to other effects. 2. Oil on canvas, 90 9/16 X 59 1/16 in. (230 x 150 cm): Wildenstein, I, 176, no. 132; and Stdidelsches Kunst- institut, Frankfurt, Die Gemilde des 19.Jahrhunderts, n.d, 223-25.



1 Claude Monet, Le Dejeuner [The Luncheon], 1868-69. Frankfurt, Stidelsches Kunstinstitut (photo: Stidelsches Kunstinstitut)



614 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 4

2 Le Dijeuner, detail (photo: Stdidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

3 Le Dejeuner, detail (photo: Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

put it on show four years later as the centerpiece of his contribution to the first Impressionist exhibition. All this by way of explanation: Le Dejeuner appears here as the figure of

figure painting for Monet, at once the locus of his ambitions in and for the genre, and the site of their abandonment. The author's ambition and abdication are both legible in the picture, condensed with telling economy within the image of the empty chair. Equally important to the picture's workings is the comfort the same chair offers to the viewer's gaze.

We know rather a lot about the circumstances of the execution of Le Dejeuner, not least because of a long letter of December 1868, in which Monet mapped out his plans for the benefit of his friend Fr6deric Bazille.3 From that letter, for example, we know that the picture was begun sometime that same month, about midway through Monet's six-month

sojourn in lodgings at Etretat. Monet, Camille Doncieux, and their fourteen-month-old son Jean Monet [sic] had installed themselves there in October, after a month or so at

F6camp, twenty kilometers up the Normandy coast. Not that Monet was in permanent residence at either address: the various painting projects offered him by the Gaudiberts- the family of wholesale merchants who, for two crucial years, were the most supportive of Monet's hometown patrons- required his frequent presence in Le Havre, and, for a longer spell, at the Gaudibert chateau nearby, in Ardennes-St.- Louis. It was there, in late October or early November, while Monet was ostensibly at work on his full-length portrait of the

younger Mme Gaudibert (a project which both bored and

depressed him) that the idea for another figure painting was mooted.4 At some stage in the process, as if looking for a kind of painted antidote to full-dress portraiture, Monet used the back of his canvas to block out in charcoal an alternative, if generalized conception (Fig. 4)-a com-

pressed, deceptively casual schema of interrelated figures signaling informality and domesticity, as against the staid, even stultifying artifice of a commissioned likeness.5 By the time of the December letter, if not before, the drawing's cast of characters-the baby in its checkered pinafore, the two women seated before a balconied window-had become more explicit in Monet's mind. The baby, at least, was not

just any toddler (nor was it the Gaudibert toddler) but was identified with Monet's son Jean-perhaps not surprisingly, given the artist's strong sense of his paternal relationship to his firstborn: when registering Jean's birth, Monet perjured himself to claim the boy as legitimate, naming Doncieux, accordingly, as his lawful wife.6 (In the final composition Jean was indeed shown as the baby, while Doncieux modeled for the visitor, and a neighbor posed as the mother. The identity of the servant is not known.)7 In fact, by December Monet's view of the picture that would become Le D'jeuner was framed and argued for by the fatherly pleasure he took in his offspring:

My friend, it's delightful to see this little creature grow- I'm really happy to have him. I'm going to paint him for the Salon, surrounded by other figures, as is right and proper [comme de juste]. I'm going to do two figure



WHY MONET GAVE UP FIGURE PAINTING 615

paintings this year, an interior with a baby and two

women, and some sailors in the open air [un intirieur avec

be'b et deuxfemmes, et des matelots en plein air], and I'm going to do it in a really amazing way.

These verbal intentions are firmly stated (they also restate the terms of the sketch) and other passages in the same letter are likewise remarkable for their decided, even insistent tone. A few weeks after having complained to Bazille that he was totally without his "former ardor," that he "saw everything in black," Monet now declared himself "in clover, surrounded by everything I love." Above all he had made up his mind about what he was going to paint, and about the

necessity of painting it away from Paris. He said so at some

length:

Believe me, I don't envy you being in Paris-I hardly miss our get-togethers, though even so I'd be happy to see some of the regulars-but frankly, I think pretty bad the kind of work that inevitably gets done in such a context- don't you think that nature is the only place to do better? I'm sure of it. What's more, I've always thought so, and whatever I've done under such conditions has always been better.

People are too preoccupied with what they see and hear in Paris, however strong they are; at least what I'll do here will have the merit of not resembling anyone else, at least I think so, since it will simply be the record of what I've felt, me personally. The more I go on, the more I regret the little I know, and the more I see that people never dare to

express what they feel frankly. It's odd. That's why I'm

doubly happy to be here, and I don't think I'll come back

very often, at most a month every year.

There is much that might be noticed about this passage: the

way it seems simultaneously to be picking up an old discussion and evolving an even more definite*position toward it, a

stricter opposition between life in Paris and the possibility of

personal experience and observation as the basis of one's

style; the way that, in consequence, regrets at friendships necessarily interrupted give way to a resolve to ration contact with the confusions of Paris more carefully than ever before; the way that Bazille is meant to conclude that personal expression hinges on conduct which he himself cannot hope to emulate-living enfamille in Etretat and painting pictures organized around one's own son.

Through the early months of 1869, Monet continued to insist on the necessity of avoiding Paris, and to count on

Bazille to do the various jobs (mostly shipping canvases and

sending pigments) he therefore could not do himself.8 By all

appearances this situation prevailed until March, when, with the Salon imminent, Monet returned to Paris, installing himself in Bazille's rue Condamine studio. (The whereabouts of Doncieux and the child in these months is obscure.) Le

Dejeuner was apparently shipped to Paris at this time, as was

appropriate for a picture conceived and destined for the Salon. (For decades the label of the Paris-Le Havre transport service survived on the stretcher, documenting in all its

banality the fact of that journey.)9 Yet in the end Monet decided against submitting any figure pictures; the two

landscapes he presented to the jury were both rejected. Not until 1870 is there evidence, of a rather backhanded sort, that Le Dejeuner was offered to the Salonjudges: the historian and critic Alfred Sensier, writing under his pen name Jean Ravenel, noted its rejection. His reference is hardly detailed, but it leaves little room for doubt that his "scene d'interieur de grandeur nature: un Dejeuner de jeunes gens" (life-size interior scene: a young people's luncheon) was the Frankfurt

picture.10 It is worth noting how easily, how satisfactorily Sensier's

description "scene d'interieur" applies to Monet's picture (remember that the painter himself first called it "interieur avec bebe et deux femmes"). This very ease helps to

3. The full text of the letter is given in the Appen- dix to this article. Citations without footnotes are taken from the same letter. 4. Monet's mood at Ardennes-St.-Louis is conveyed by a letter cited in Wildenstein, I, 425, doc. 43: "Je suis dans un chateau aux environs du Havre, oi je suis relu a ravir dans un pays charmant. Mais tout cela ne suffit pas a me redonner cette ancienne ardeur. La peinture ne va pas, et decidementje ne

compte plus sur la gloire. Je m'en vais dans le

troisibme dessous. En somme, je n'ai absolument rien fait depuis que je vous ai quitt&. Je suis devenu tout a fait paresseux, tout m'ennuie des queje veux

travailler;je vois tout en noir." 5. No longer visible since the canvas was relined in 1957, the charcoal drawing (16 s/8 x 9 7/ in. [41 x 25 cm]; Wildenstein, v, no. 431) has long been known. The large size of the Gaudibert canvas, 85 x 54 5/16 in. (216 x 138 cm), and the expense of such a

purchase make it likely that the sketch on its verso

postdates a commission from the family: the canvas, in other words, must have been bought ex-

pressly for the portrait commission. The purpose of the drawing is more difficult to establish. Most authorities agree that it is related to Le Dijeuner, on

the basis of the citation quoted here from Monet's December 1868 letter to Bazille (see Wildenstein, I, no. 121, for previous bibliography). Also mentioned is the possibility that the sketch may map another idea for a Gaudibert portrait. Although Marguerite Gaudibert (1846-1877), the sitter for the Orsay picture, had a young son Louis (b. 1865) whom Monet depicted in a bust-length portrait, there is no evidence of a project to depict him with his mother. Monet's letter to Bazille, with its mention of a Salon picture to include his own son with two women, makes this the more likely subject of the charcoal sketch. I am grateful to Mme Anne Distel, Conservateur de Peinture, Mus'e d'Orsay, for her help in obtaining a photograph of the

drawing and permission to reproduce it here. 6. Wildenstein, I, 37, no. 266. 7. For Monet's testimony concerning the identity of the women in Le Dejeuner, as well as in the two small versions of dinner-table scenes (Mellon and Buhrle collections; Wildenstein, I, nos. 129, 130), see J. Rewald, "Notes sur deux tableaux de Claude Mo- net," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LXX, Oct. 1967, 245-48. Note that Champa, 31, also considers that Don- cieux posed for the woman at left. He identifies the model for the seated mother as Mrs. Alfred Sisley.

8. Wildenstein, I, 426, docs. 46-48; letters of Jan. 11, late Jan. or early Feb., and Feb. 10, 1869. The

picture was painted on an industrially grounded canvas, according to Dr. Christiane D. Andersson, curator, and Herr Peter Waldeis, conservator, Stdidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. 9. Curatorial files, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frank- furt. My gratitude to to Dr. H. Ziemke, curator of

European Paintings at the museum, for communi-

cating this piece of information. 10. Jean Ravenel [Alfred Sensier], "Preface au Sa- lon de 1870," Revue internationale de l'art et de la curiositW, Apr. 15, 1870, 323. The passage reads: "On nous annonce que M. Monet (ne pas confuser avec M. Manet) a eu deux tableaux refuses. Une scene d'interieur de grandeur nature: un Dejeuner dejeunes gens, puis un paysage. M. Monet est un artiste peu heureux avec lesjurys passes et presents. Ce n'est pas cependant un artiste sans talent; il est meme dote d'un temperament de peintre que bien d'hommes seraient heureux de posseder. Nous avons vu de lui des vues de Paris, des etudes de foret et des figures executees avec un sentiment tr's vif, d'une harmonie atmospherique, peu com- mune de nos jours. M. Manet [sic], en revanche a




4 Monet, Two Women and a Child, 1868. Paris, Muse d'Orsay (photo: Mus6e d'Orsay, courtesy A. Distel)

emphasize the obvious but essential truth that Monet here was turning his hand to a generic category of picture making. The moment was appropriate; other artists were doing likewise. Degas's version of the type (most plausibly dated

1869) was simply called Interieur-just another genre painting, according to its maker. Thus Monet's insistence on

resembling no one, on painting only what he personally had

experienced, was nonetheless not meant to keep his work from being categorized: he wished it to be outstanding of its kind.

There are other ways to measure Monet's determination to stand out. One involves becoming a reader of his press notices, and imagining him reading the same texts. At just this moment, for example, he was being mentioned in the

pages of L'Artiste in notably comparative terms. Speaking of a show in Le Havre, the fictional critic Rene de la Fert6 (he was

actually the journal's editor, Arsene Houssaye, using one of his many pen names) had this to say:

One of the least contested successes was Monet's Femme en robe verte aux raies noires which was already shown in Paris two years ago-I remember it well. It was a milestone in the history of art, so much so that M. Arsine Houssaye bought it for his gallery, all the while preaching against this school. Some logic! This winter it will be judged by candlelight alongside a whole raft of sanctified works."I

This apparently offhand comment is certainly banal-art- world gossip, pure and simple. It is also obscure. Yet it can

carry some weight in an effort to conjure up the context in which Monet saw himself at work. The scene imagines a trial

by candlelight for Camille-La Robe Verte, Monet's Salon success of 1866-the kind of shadowy ritual of inspection much beloved by neoclassical amateurs and usually reserved for masterpieces, "les oeuvres consacres." The threat could not have mattered very much, since it was the brainchild of Monet's patron, Houssaye himself. (As the editor ofL'Artiste, he often made use of pseudonyms-there were more than

twenty, all told-to give his magazine the illusion of diver-

sity.) Yet trivial as Houssaye's notion seems, it conjures up a context of inspection and rivalry in which ambitions were formed and reputations made. I believe that Monet took it

seriously. Or perhaps better stated, that it overlapped with and perhaps even reinforced his own ambitions to use Le

Dijeuner as the means for a more structured and ambitiously historical intervention in the contemporary practice of figure painting than he had achieved to date.'2

This was an intention that came over him gradually; it

certainly surfaced after he had mapped out his first idea.

Ultimately it meant grafting his "personal" observations onto a framework borrowed from Vermeer, the decade's

rediscovery (Fig. 5). That framework was specific: a vertical format, a window lighting the scene from the left, and,

unmistakably, the empty chair at right. Any one of these traits might make a picture seem generically Dutch; used

together after 1866, they carried rather more particular weight. In Vermeer's case, such conventions were the arma- ture of a way of painting which was believed to proceed, in the words of Theophile Thor,,

"sans pretention emblema-

tique," where "tout [est] compris par l'expression meme des

personnages."'13 In Monet's case, the same devices offered a means of demonstrating both his ambitions and his affilia- tion with the values of naturalism and clarity Vermeer's art was held to convey.

Monet's decision in 1874 to include his canvas-appar-

,t, regu, il a deux tableaux de figures, mais il l'a

echapp, belle."

11. "Le Monde des arts," L'Artiste, Iv, Nov. 1, 1868, 273. As cited by his biographer E. Lemaitre, Arsene

Houssaye: Notes et souvenirs; Bibliographie, Reims, 1897, 118, Houssaye's many pseudonyms included, in addition to Rene de la Fert6: Lord Pilgrim, Henri Trianon, Valet de Carreau, Octave de Pari- sis, G. de Chastenay, Franz Larivire, Comte de

Moussy, Un Parisien, G. de Montbeyraud, Maurice

Duvernay, P. de l'Estoile, Princesse X, Charles

Coligny, and Hector Callias. He also used the names Pierre Dax and Alfred Mousse. Houssaye seems to have been accustomed to employing L'Artiste for low-key puffs of his own activities and

possessions. In 1870, for example, under the name Karl Bertrand, he writes of the moment when he will give both Camille-La Robe verte and his Renoir to the Mus6e du Luxembourg (L'Artiste, vI, June 1, 1870, 319-20.). 12. It is certain that Houssaye's purchase of Cam- ille-La Robe verte had real weight with Monet. It

came at a crucial moment-not so much for the

monetary support it offered, but for more symbolic reasons, as Monet made clear in a letter to Bazille of late Oct. or early Nov., 1868 (Wildenstein, I, 425, doc. 43: "Cependant j'ai fait une vente sinon

avantageuse du c6t6 p6cuniaire, avantageuse peut- etre pour l'avenir, quoique je n'y croie plus gure. J'ai vendu la Femme verte ' Arsne Houssaye, qui est venu au Havre, qui est enthousiaste et veut me lancer, dit-il." Several months later, in June 1869,




5 Engraving after Jan Vermeer, A Lady Standing at the Virginals (from Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1866; photo: J. Cook)

ently as yet unexhibited-in the first Impressionist show, is an appendix to this first chapter of its history.14 By then, if not before, it had been signed and incorrectly dated 1868, in a gesture that claimed for it a certain kind of priority. Its

implications are perhaps best approached by way of one further piece of information with some circumstantial bear-

ing on the painting's history. Le Dijeuner happens to have been drawn by Bazille in a quick but nonetheless detailed and observant sketch entered in a notebook, most likely in the spring of 1869 (Fig. 6).15 This date is argued for by drawings on the verso of the same page: both of Manet's 1869 Salon entries appear there in brief, with greater weight given to the smaller of the two, Manet's own luncheon

picture, Le Dejeuner dans l'atelier (1868). Le Balcon is tucked in between the larger sketch and the notebook's spine (Figs. 7-9). This simple contiguity is interesting enough in itself, and the handling on both pages is moreover very similar, suggesting an execution close in time. Even more interest-

ing, however, is the fact that contiguity actually gives way to a kind of contamination: that is, the head and arms of Manet's seated man, and even a few lines indicating the upper right corner of Manet's canvas, appear beneath the sketch of Monet's picture, as if Bazille began to draw Manet's composi-

tion thinking to juxtapose the two Dejeuners. Realizing pretty quickly that he had not left enough room, he turned the page and carried on as before.

Bazille's instinct to compare these two pictures was cer-

tainly not wrong; we will emulate it before too long, as Monet doubtless did himself. But there are two further aspects of these sketches which are intriguing. First, there is the

question of the site or location for Bazille's comparative procedure: in juxtaposing the De'jeuners was he closing the

gap between a work Monet had had delivered to his friend's studio and a picture concurrently on view at the Salon? Or does the juxtaposition mean that the two paintings were

actually viewable, however briefly, in the same space, at the collection point for Salon submissions, for example? (Curi- ously enough, in 1869 Arsene Houssaye interceded with the Salon officials on Monet's behalf, asking that he be allowed to

4'

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6 Fr6d6ric Bazille, Sketch of Monet's Le Dejeuner, 1869. Paris, Mus6e du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins (photo: Reunion des Mus6es Nationaux)

following his failure to be accepted by the 1869

Salonjury, Monet wrote to Houssaye in the hope of

prompting a second purchase-it is tempting to believe that the painter thought Le Dejeuner might pique his erstwhile patron's interest; Wildenstein, I, 426, doc. 49. 13. Thore, as is well known, was the critic who first described Vermeer's art to a French public; this

particular citation is from his long article "Van der Meer, de Delft," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, xxI, 1866, 297-330, 458-70, 542-75, an article discussed at

some length by, among others, M. Fried, "Manet's Sources," Artforum, vii, Mar. 1969, 59 and n. 171; and F. Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, Ithaca, N.Y., 1976, 85-90. 14. Soci&~t Anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., Premiere Exposition, 1874, no. 103. For excerpts from contemporary criticism see H. Adhemar and S. Gache, L'Exposition de 1874 chez Nadar, exh. cat., Paris, [1974], n.p. See also San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museums, The New Paint-

ing: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exh. cat., San

Francisco, 1986, 93-123. The annotated catalogue, which included prices asked at the 1874 show, referred to by Adhemar and Gache in 1974 as

being among the papers of Claude Roger Marx, seems presently difficult to trace. My thanks to Mme Distel and Mme Adhemar for this information. 15. Mus&e du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, RF 5259. These sketches were noted by Champa, 30, but he failed to notice that the copy of the Monet is in fact distinctly different from the final picture in the ways I mention below.




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7 Bazille, Sketch of Manet's Le Balcon (The Balcony) and Deijeuner dans l'atelier (Luncheon in the Studio), 1869. Paris, Mus6e du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins (photo: Reunion des Mus6es Nationaux)

8 Eugene Manet, Dijeuner dans l'atelier, 1868. Munich, Neue Pinakothek (photo: Neue Pinakothek)

retouch his submissions before the jury's scrutiny. The

request was refused.)16 The suggestion is not answerable, of course, but if the second possibility were the answer, it would mean that Monet decided against submission at the very last minute, when his request for permission to retouch was denied, and took his picture home again, perhaps to work on it some more. This last suggestion is reinforced by the fact that Bazille's sketch preserves an earlier version of Monet's

composition, one eventually altered in the area of the woman on the left. Her easy posture, with arms supporting her against the windowsill, has been modified to allow her to

clasp her hands in a more contained, less informal way; by the same logic, the daytime dress which fitted her closely at waist and bodice, showing off the projecting profile of her breasts (Bazille seems to have worried about how far they actually did project), has been covered over by a short, rather

shapeless fringed jacket. The other variations between sketch and painting-the absence of playthings under the chair, or of elements of the table setting, most notably the glass, bottle, and carafe beside the empty plate-offer less conclu- sive evidence concerning an earlier version of Monet's

picture: their absence might simply be the omissions of an observer aiming at general summary-as Bazille certainly was. The same cannot be said of the pose and costume of the woman at the left, not least because their alteration changes both her identity and the meaning of her presence in the room.

Le Dejeuner itself reveals traces of the kind of indecision or revision that Bazille's sketch documents. The overall coher- ence of its illusion of domestic comfort and order (an illusion meant to be savored, above all, in the repeated conjurings of the material presence of those comforts, from lace curtains and damask tablecloth to the covered jam pot and crusty loaf of bread) does not obscure the extent to which its various terms were hard won. The dark-clad figure of the visitor is not the only one whose aspect Monet reconsidered. At some

point, certainly before Bazille's sketch, the mother was shifted lower and to the right; her work basket too was

apparently much labored over, judging from its craquelure, without its various versions having much chance to dry betweentimes. This pattern of changes, with its suggestion of a gradual accommodation of figures and objects to their final

pictorial task, was particularly important for the servant

hovering in the doorway at the rear. If her inclusion helps to jell the class-specific nature of the scene, it was also the last major compositional decision Monet made, as is clear not only from the drawing done chez Gaudibert, but also from the fact that her placement is absolutely contingent on the location of the mother at table. In other words, the servant's

position was won only by the mother's shift to the right; even so, space is tight and the figure compressed and out of scale.7

Of course it is entirely possible that Monet withheld Le Dejeuner in 1869 for reasons unconnected with his desire to modify its composition; it will be useful to discuss those reasons here. They were largely economic. Although Monet was accustomed to considering the Salon in particular, and exhibitions in general, as good for business-decisive for sales as well as reputation-he was forced to revise his perception considerably in the course of 1868, when exhibit- ing twice brought the opposite of the desired result. First, the




9 Manet, Le Balcon, 1868. Paris, Mus&e d'Orsay (photo: Reunion des Mus~es Nationaux)

single landscape he showed at the Salon of 1868, Navires sortant des jeties du Havre, no. 1787, was attached by two different creditors, MM. Lalouette and Couchetet.18 Cer-

tainly this was bad enough-it was a fate which befell only eleven of the 2,975 artists showing that year and which in Monet's case resulted in the permanent loss and ultimate

disappearance of his picture-but even worse were the hazards run by four of the five works he contributed to the

Exposition maritime internationale du Havre. After it closed in November 1868, the paintings were seized and sold at auction, again to satisfy creditors. Satisfaction must have been limited, since they fetched ridiculously low prices. Gaudibert was high bidder, and returned his purchases to their author.19 According to Boudin, Monet nonetheless returned from Etretat in a sad state-"l'oreille basse"-as a result. Such risks may have made the younger painter

cautious about his next Salon submission; a canvas like Le

Dijeuner was a lot to lose.

At this juncture two not unrelated questions might be put to this welter of circumstance. What kinds of interpretative strategies, we might well ask, seem licensed by our knowl-

edge of the conditions in which Le Deijeuner was produced? And what kinds of interpretations has the picture in fact received? While the latter question is clearly the more easily answered, the former is more interesting: Le De'jeuner demands a reading which answers for its history of conflicting intentions, ambitions, and ambivalences. To paint a picture for the Paris Salon, but to maintain unconditionally the

necessity of doing so far from Paris; to contend that one's work will be the product of personal sensation and experience alone, all the while knowing-indeed trusting-that the result will sustain comparison not only with one's rival

Manet, but also with the great tradition; to insist on the

continuity between one's personal life and the construct of familial domesticity through which a calculated intervention in modern-life painting can be made, and to build that insistence into the very fabric of one's painting as its narrative-these are ways to plot a painterly strategy at odds with itself, yet nonetheless one still trying to make continu- ities out of essentially disjunctive, discontinuous attitudes and materials. It is that effort at continuity which, I shall

argue, Monet found untenable. The art-historical approach, not surprisingly, has in a

sense paralleled that of Monet himself, with the desire for

continuity most vividly expressed in the kind of transparency usually posited between the contentment expressed in the December letter to Bazille and the content of Le Dejeuner. Most writers have clutched at that letter, with its glimpse of Monet in clover and en famille, as an affecting and welcome

respite from his epistolary stock in trade, four parts ego and three parts money. Here at last it is possible to enjoy, even to

project oneself into Monet's life. Take Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge in this context, in the wake of their citations from it:

There is something infinitely touching about this letter, in which the idealized pride and happiness of the young father fuse with the artist's ambition and his ruthless drive for an independence of which he is absolute master. It is

as though his quiet provincial lodgings, made magical by the presence of his beautiful mistress and their baby, had been transformed into an idyllic land where innocence and untrammeled expression were within his grasp.20

16. Ministere de la Culture et de la Communica- tion, Hommage a Monet, exh. cat., Paris, 1980, 56, n. 7; Houssaye's letter of intercession is housed in the Archives du Louvre, along with another by one

Beurdeley, assumed to be an amateur from Le Havre, perhaps a friend of the Gaudiberts. I have been refused access to the Archives du Louvre to check the records of Enregistrement, which might shed some light on the paintings that Monet

actually submitted in 1869. Wildenstein believes that they were La Pie (Musee d'Orsay; Wildenstein, I, no. 133) and Bdteaux de piche en mer (Hillstead Museum, Farmington, Conn.; Wildenstein, I, no. 126).

17. At my request, Herr Peter Waldeis, conservator 18. Paris, Archives Nationales, F21531: "Note pour Monsieur Tournois. Oppositions faites sur des

ouvrages exposes." This document, a list prepared by Buon, the functionary of the Ministbre des Beaux-Arts responsible for the smooth workings of the Salon, is accompanied by a letter to Tournois, Chef des Beaux-Arts, dated Nov. 1868. The normal fate of works attached by creditors was sequestra- tion, a task performed in 1868 by the color dealer

Carpentier, 8 boulevard Montmartre. However, a note, "ne faut pas venir chez M. Carpentier," scrawled on the list suggests that Monet's picture

(no. 1787) was not turned over to him. Carpentier was the color dealer Monet usually patronized in the late sixties. 19. The incident was widely reported by a number of people, including Boudin and Monet himself. For Boudin's version, see G. Jean Aubry, Eugene Boudin, d'apris des documents inddits: L'Homme et l'oeuvre, Paris, 1922; for Monet's, see Wildenstein, I, doc. 49. 20. R. Gordon and A. Forge, Monet, New York, 1983, 41.




Admittedly, this is an extreme instance of the sort of

hyperbolic projection I am pointing to, yet it is not an isolated one. It likewise occurs in the musings of Charles Merrill Mount, for example: "The delight of Monet's tiny dining room was great when filled by Camille and their infant

son, upon whom a special emotional glow had settled. These

persons and this place brought a redemptive liberation of the spirit: never had he experienced the same contentment."''21 Even the cooler, more professional voices of art

history (after all, Mount casts himself in the guise of a

biographer, while Forge is a painter and critic) adduce the December letter as evidence that Le Dejeuner is as much a

personal memento as a painted fiction: dryly, in Kermit

Champa's case-the picture is "an obvious document of Monet's momentarily blissful domestic life";22 elliptically, in William Seitz's-"Although Monet is not present, the

picture is almost a self-portrait, for his personality dominates the room."23 This is not to say that the personal view leads to identical conclusions in each instance: Seitz proceeds to characterize the picture in terms of "a realism ... of large strokes ... and of extraordinary veracity of color tone."24

Champa's interpretation rests, not incorrectly, on Le De'jeuner's relation to Manet.25 Gordon and Forge not only construe the canvas in the glow of the "magic idyll" with which they associate it, but also register their terror at the absence of any pleasure in the physical presence of Doncieux and Jean: "Camille's hand resting on the tablecloth is simply a coarsely painted piece of matter. The velvet ribbon that circles her neck is merely noted, as are the folds of the bib tucked up to the baby's chin. What clues and invitations to their weight and warmth Monet turns aside!"26 Yet such qualifications, no matter what their tone, only slightly obstruct the linkage between an idea of Monet's mental state and a view of the

picture to go with it.

Except in Mount's case, that is. For him the picture is all, or at least mostly, wrong; not because he is oblivious to Monet's declaration of contentment, or because he denies that Le Dejeuner stems from that emotion, but because of his violent dislike for the terms in which Monet expressed his

feelings:

Sadly he did not understand these same human objects were infinitely less compelling to strangers, that to them the homely drama he proceeded to trace upon a large canvas moved into the dining room would look utterly different. Indeed, his account of the scene can be recom- mended to all appreciators of the human comedy for

containing every farcical and hilarious element of bour-

geois life. . . . The literalness of the subject, the imbalance of the composition, the inappropriateness of the dining room's brown walls from the start made the venture

dowdy.... Throughout such sadly limited proficiency coexists with master strokes. The result lies halfway between boredom and despair, for everything is careful, workmanlike, and badly drawn. Knowledge of the sham circumstances in which all was done transforms it into a

deadly satire.27

Even these few phrases are enough to recall that Mount has

operated as the self-styled moral bellwether of Monet stud-

ies; he has sided with Camille Doncieux in a battle between the sexes whose major skirmishes have been staged posthu- mously and in print. In his article "The Making of a Heroine," for example, Mount argued for a new view of Monet as a deceiver of innocent girlhood who married for

money, squandered a dowry, and then consigned his wife to the grave.28 By his lights, these are the "sham circumstances" in which Le Dejeuner is implicated-as indeed it is. But such melodramatics only trade heroines for heroes and in the

process misdiagnose as personal (caddish Claude, victimized

Camille) relations between men and women which in the nineteenth century were systemic and legally enforced.

Mount's lucubrations focus our attention on the nature of the problem facing Le Dejeuner's commentators. The task

hinges on the necessity of adjudicating between claims which are notoriously troublesome for art history to resolve. What is the "personal dimension" of a painting? What aspects of a

painting's structure are supplied, not by the "person" mak-

ing it, but by the assumptions and decorum of the wider

practice of which the individual picture is a part? In Monet's

case, answering these questions means severing, even if only artificially, two crucial documents, the letter and the picture, normally taken as mutually informative and dependent. Such corrective surgery is salutary, because it puts right the deformation caused by their customary pairing: the bland elision of writing and painting as if both practices were,

directly and unproblematically, translations of the impulses of an individual ego. More useful than this reflective model, it seems to me, is an exploration of the status of both letter and picture as fictions, stories told by their maker-and,

unwittingly, about their maker.

Take, for example, Monet's letter to Bazille. It is rife with

intention, full of energetic decision and laced with emotion, all of which I and other authors duly dissect as evidence in whatever case is being urged at the moment. What does not

always figure in such analyses is the fact that the evidence takes the form of a letter to Bazille. So much is obvious.

Perhaps I will better make my point if I say that evidence in this case is extracted from an order of discourse with its own

aims, traditions, and protocols. Thirty-nine letters make up the discursive category, strictly defined; documents of a

friendship, they have that status because they constructed the terms in which a friendship was lived out. How to read them? They risk making the relationship seem one-sided, for

a start: while Bazille preserved Monet's halfofthe correspondence, Monet threw Bazille's letters away. Thus we must rely on other depictions of Bazille's feeling for Monet. Some do survive: there are the two views of Bazille's studio, which

Bazille painted in 1866 and 1867, where a portrait of Monet

(by Gilbert A. Severac) and landscapes by him are both

represented-as if he had left his mark on spaces in some sense synonymous with Bazille's rather precarious identity as a painter.29 In his third studio scene, Intirieur de l'atelier dans la rue Condamine (1870; Mus6e d'Orsay), Monet's work no

longer figures and the artist himself is only one of a larger cast of characters whose presence signals Bazille's growing self-assurance concerning his place in a wider painters' world.

Compared to these emblematic messages (which might be




thought to stand for the side of the story Bazille's letters would have told) Monet's words more directly bespeak both the nature of the bond between the two men and the role of letters in it. The friends were not infrequently separated because of family commitments and painting projects; writ-

ing allowed them to sustain a relationship based, for Monet's

part, at least, on a kind of coercive dependency, a pattern of

passivity and aggression which from this distance resembles

nothing so much as a thinly disguised repetition of a father-son relationship. Bazille in this instance held the

(quasi-paternal) purse strings: he doled out loans and gifts of

money and by 1868 had arrived at a formula for a kind of

allowance-fifty francs a month, which, very slowly, pur- chased Femmes au jardin. Monet, for his part, treated these emoluments both as his due and remarkably slow in coming; Bazille often turned a deaf ear to his importunings, as if

disciplining an unruly charge.30 But in any analysis of Monet's letters, it is ultimately their

tone that most needs characterization: they shift rapidly between boasts and regrets, entreaties for money and com-

plaints when it was not promptly forthcoming. And in every instance, Monet is prone to contrasting the extremity of his situation with his friend's greater luck and privilege. Bazille has money, leisure, and a carefree existence, and Monet does not hesitate to remind him that in his situation he himself would do wonders (here the paternal roles get inverted; it's Monet who in effect is saying, "If I were your age").

There was real intimacy in this relationship, but that did not stop Monet's letters from being manipulative, having axes to grind and proofs to offer. And-perhaps this goes without saying-it did not keep them from being less than

complete records of their author's mental state. When Monet wrote to Bazille he used a particular voice, one developed through writing to Bazille, and suited to that purpose. In the December letter, accordingly, his message was pointed. He offered a (premature) resolution, a happy ending of sorts-- housekeeping en famille-to a situation in which Bazille had been an increasingly reluctant participant. Although at the news of Doncieux's pregnancy Bazille had interceded with Monet's father on his friend's behalf, he eventually stopped answering Claude's letters as the birth approached, unwilling or unable to respond to a situation which took a course rather distant from the one he contemplated following himself. His own dealings with women were altogether more

conventional, steeped as they were in bourgeois practicality rather than bourgeois romanticism. Thus he was more or less resigned to a suitable marriage, sooner or later, to a young lady ("well bred and a good musician, that's the formula") of his parents' choosing.31 And a phrase from one of Renoir's letters to Bazille raises the suspicion that the latter had made no secret of his dislike for Monet's situation: "You can be

calm where I'm concerned [as opposed to Monet], seeing that I have neither wife nor child, and am not ready to have either one."32 Monet, of course, offered no such reassur-

ances; he made a meal of his domestic happiness when finally he had a measure of domesticity to boast of, in order to

justify conduct which parental wisdom (as communicated

through Bazille) had warned him to forsake. How much more beatific that hard-won happiness if it provided a setting for Salon painting; how much more pointed the accompany- ing inquiry as to the progress of Bazille's own Salon projects: "I hope that you too are fired up and have really put your nose to the grindstone. It's so stupid to waste time willingly. You've got everything going for you, you ought to work wonders. Happy mortal, tell me what you'll have in the Salon and if you're satisfied."

Let me hasten to say that in asking for a cautious reading of Monet's letter I am not aiming to disqualify its evidence out of hand. Rather, I want to know how to read it, how to assess its claims. If anything, my reading urges a heightened consciousness of Monet's subjectivity at work. The text

emphatically presents Monet's written voice; in its brief course he uses the pronoun Je forty-six times-I think, I

need, I intend, I'm in clover. The result is the construction of an ego which operates, in the space of the letter, implicitly in terms of the difference it establishes from someone else- from Bazille. The issue here is not so much whether Monet's words are the best guides to his painting (though they certainly have been read as such) but whether we can read

past their role in a conversation with Bazille, and around the

necessary qualifications thereby imposed, to claim for them

any other significance. I believe we can, that a view of the letter as a personal statement can survive, with the following proviso: reading Monet's letter as the construction of an ego means not taking it as transparent to any essential subject Monet, to an unqualified self evidenced in toto and anew each time Monet states his feelings, or, for that matter, paints his son.

This judgment of Monet's letter encapsulates-can stand as a metaphor for-the stance I take toward Le Dejeuner. Here too I do not want so much to disqualify the view that it is a peculiarly personal invention as to see its personal aspects as constructed within a context-and therefore necessarily visible through, or in the margins of, other concerns. Le

Dtjeuner is a first-person statement: this is painting as

"spoken" by Monet; we have more than epistolary confirma- tion of this idea. The picture itself quite literally structures a site for the I: in it Monet's place is both mapped and left unfilled, as if to insist the more actively on his continuing relevance to the world he has imagined. In this sense, the notion of the painting as paralleled by the letter can be of

21. C. M. Mount, Monet, New York, 1966, 172. 22. Champa, 29. 23. W. C. Seitz, Claude Monet, New York, 1960, 80. 24. Ibid. 25. Champa, 30-31. 26. Gordon and Forge (as in n. 20), 66. 27. Mount (as in n. 21), 172-73. 28. C. M. Mount, "New Materials on Claude Mo-

net: The Discovery of a Heroine," Art Quarterly, xxv, no. 4, 1962, 313-30. 29. Art Institute of Chicago, Friddric Bazille and Early Impressionism, exh. cat., Chicago, 1978, nos. 18, 23, repr. 30. For Monet's side of the correspondence, see Wildenstein, I, docs. 8, 11, 12, 14-22, 28-48, 50-54. Bazille's surviving letters to family and to friends other than Monet are reproduced in Art

Institute of Chicago (as in n. 29), 153-212; and Poulain, passim. 31. Poulain, 106: "bien dlevee et bonne musici- enne, c'est la formule." 32. Poulain, 154, letter of Aug. 1869: "vu queje n'ai ni femme ni enfant, et que je ne suis pas pret d'avoir ni lun ni lautre."




further use; like the letter, the picture is an utterance which

repeatedly says, if not I, then my. And those articulations are

notably specific, marvelously circumstantial-as a result

reducing the viewer's sense of the arbitrariness of the

proffered fiction. Monet's creative powers here make vigor- ous claims to offering a kind of visual completeness: color, texture, density, transparency are described at length and with an assertiveness which insists on the accessibility of this domestic world. And by virtue of that very accessibility, his

experience becomes the viewer's experience, his chair, the viewer's chair, in an identification which is at least partly the function of the distinction made between it (empty, yet receptively drawn out from the table) and the comparable chair at left. Back facing out, the latter excludes us; rather it is given over to the stuff of family life-the work basket, hat, and doll-which operate as emblems of both mother and child. If we enter this picture we do so as Monet, taking his seat at the family meal.

Monet's chair, it might be argued, here functions as a kind of privileged intersection, condensing the several construc- tions or fictions which the picture articulates. Not only does it stand for Monet's place in a familial order, but it also

guarantees the viewer's access to that same order, ensuring, moreover, that she or he will thus assume a position generically similar to that which Monet constructs for himself as

bourgeois male head of household. (The newspaper at his place, the top hat on the sideboard, and the visitor at the window all effectively cancel the option that the meal awaits the arrival of another woman.) Moreover, the chair keys the relationship with Vermeer, and even, I believe, the essential difference from Manet-another sense, of course, in which Monet's bid to be recognized as having achieved personal expression must be understood. These four chains of meaning overlap and are grounded in the same representations; they are separable with difficulty, if at all. Nonetheless for the space remaining I want to prize them apart far enough to allow a distinction between the ways they contribute to the two crucial readings of Le Dejeuner as a personal statement: the idea that Monet is acting through the picture to create an individual brand of painting, and the notion that he is constructing himself, his subjectivity, in the picture.

A proper history of Monet's engagement with figure painting would be both narrow and deep. Four years are involved, and only a few more paintings, but in that limited span Monet's conception not only brought itself abreast of current practice but also advanced and retrenched several times. Le Dejeuner marks a point of retrenchment, in a sense; a return, in the wake of the failure of Femmes au jardin to win public exhibition, to the ground of the rivalry with Manet by which,

10 Monet, Dijeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1865. Moscow, Pushkin Museum (from Wildenstein, I, 145; photo: J. Cook)




11 Monet, Femmes aujardin (Women in the Garden), 1866-67. Paris, Mus6e d'Orsay (photo: Reunion des Mus6es Nationaux)

12 Photographer unknown (Bazille?), Women in the Garden at Mkric, ca. 1865 (from L'Amour de l'art, 1937; photo: J. Cook)

13 Photographer unknown (Bazille?), Women in the Garden at Miric, ca. 1865 (from L'Amour de l'art, 1937; photo: J. Cook)

in his Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1865-66; Fig. 10) he had inaugu- rated his career in figures. In fact the essential similarities between Monet's two luncheon pictures make the Femmes au

jardin (Fig. 11) seem something of an anomaly; reviving the idea advanced half a century ago, by Raymond Bouyer, that it was painted, if not at Bazille's instigation, then in consulta- tion with him, perhaps even under the spell of photographs he supplied (Figs. 12, 13), is a means of approaching its differences from Monet's other figural efforts.33 The photographs naturalize and particularize the picture's action as a modern-life subject-something that the peculiar frozen

patterned fixity of Monet's execution tends to undercut. One way to name the anomalous status of Femmes aujardin

is to point to the stress it places on the easy informal syntax of

Bazille's amateur snaps. Monet's hyperdescriptive mode- his effort at activating his canvas with observed detail (in color), as well as with the starkest of light effects-stiffens and in a sense defamiliarizes a scene which the processes of

photography, at least when practiced at this level, seem to take for granted. Certainly there are technical reasons for Monet's hectic realism, if not for its most anxious moments, such as the complex figure-ground patterns which are meant to manage the intersection of the bush at right with the substances and spaces adjoining; or the fussy flowers dotting the lawn at lower left. In Le Dejeuner, by contrast, Monet backed away from the problematic procedure of painting in full sunlight to stage a scene whose illumination is nicely filtered through lace.

33. These photographs, attributed to Bazille, were published in "Inspiratrice de l'oeuvre d'art," L'Amour de l'Art, xvIII, 1937, 16.




14 Manet, Dijeuner sur l'herbe, 1863. Paris, Musde d'Orsay (photo: Reunion des Musees Nationaux)

Its spatial syntax likewise has had its ease restored.

Compared to the Femmes au jardin there is an amplitude here which is a function of the domesticity Monet has meant to

parse. A measured amplitude-like a Vermeer writ large-is in some sense the order of the day. The picture's objects are counted and contrasted in ways which ensure this perception: there are four eggs and two novels and two hats; bread sliced and as a loaf; grapes and jam and wine; a child and a

doll, oil and vinegar, water and wine, meat and potatoes, a work basket and playthings, a lamp and a window, a mother and a visitor and a servant, and an empty chair. These

regularities inscribe the social dimension of Monet's painting in a way not unlike the production of sociability which is the

key aspect of Monet's earlier Dejeuner, the one set out of doors. In that instance the orderliness achieved (the picture's syntax, once again) is admittedly much more generic. There Monet worked against giving his figures an individuality which is more than conventional: they differ only as to

posture and dress. (This is partly a product of a functional lack of differentiation among them: a very few models,

notably Bazille and Doncieux, posed for many figures.) Accordingly the distinctions which are operative are those which construct the relaxed sociability of the occasion: the

picnickers chat, flirt, recline, lay the plates, fix their hats, and this interlocking chain of actions is the picture's content.

In his Dejeuner sur l'herbe the painter offers a guarantee of his picture's intelligibility: the crouching liveried servant, with his hamper and the pile of wraps. On him the picture's syntax rests; his role is in a sense not unlike that of Monet's

chair. Both presences ensure the legibility of the order in which they participate; the servant offers not so much a site for looking, as a metaphor for looking as a class-distinct

procedure and a means of distinguishing with some certitude the class nature of what is contemplated. Like the bonne in the later picture, moreover, he is a sign for class difference,

brought into contiguity with the central action to make that difference clear. The Dijeuner's chair is even more pivotal: not only does it offer a place and an identity from which to

look, but it also states implicitly that the picture is intelligible. By its presence the painting remains a scene where, to borrow Thord's opinion of Vermeer, "tout est compris": in

making Vermeer's chair his own, Monet was simultaneously importing, or so he thought, a device which insists that the

proffered painterly fiction can be viewed and understood,

provided we take up the role it offers us-that is, if we assume the proper subjectivity within its construct.

This construct of intelligibility-so decisively sited in both of Monet's Dejeuners-is one key means devised by the artist to develop his own brand of figure painting, and moreover, to achieve the essential distinction which that task entailed. The difference was a semantic one, rather like saying Monet, not Manet; it was evidently achieved by naturalizing a narrative of sociability, by insisting on its knowability and by offering the necessary, that is, operative, distinctions as the essence of the tale. Manet, by contrast, and especially in the two key points of reference, his Dejeuners (Figs. 8, 14), strained intelligibility to the utmost; there are no structures, like Monet's chair or servants, which serve to underwrite the




availability of meaning. Such assurances are instead deflected; the task of assigning meaning is bounced back into the viewer's space, and seems almost to be made the viewer's

responsiblity, by characters whose gaze is the agency oblig- ing, even challenging, the spectator to understand.

It would be hard to exaggerate, I think, how much Monet insisted that the gathering at his table was knowable, even

familiar, to the kind of people likely to be its viewers. It still seems familiar-uncannily so; so unproblematic, in fact, that it is necessary consciously to remember how much this is a

picture of up-to-the-minute middle-class mores. Take the meal itself: the fare is quintessentially French, a menu still chalked up in caf6s at lunchtime: "des oeufs, un plat, une

salade, un fruit, pain et vin compris." It takes a moment to recall that at the time, authorities such as comtesse de

Bassinville, author of Le Conseiller des bonnes minageres, would have applauded its exemplary balance of courses. In 1868 the comtesse was still pushing her readers toward such

variety: "One ought never, as is done in many houses and above all in the provinces, to serve a meal made entirely of meat, even if the meats are very varied."34 By these lights, chops and salad and potatoes were a most appropriate luncheon for up-to-date householders and other readers of cookbooks. (It was these middle-class readers who first

developed a taste for the once exotic pomme de terre.)35 Little

Jean's presence at table, duly delivered by the maid, was

equally salutary: how better to accustom him, under his mother's supervision, to the simple diet approved for children (and to the fact that, as a matter of course, he would be "less well served than his parents").36 But should a child misbehave, he was to be whisked away at once. Thus the servant hovers in the door, with one eye on her charge.37

This kind of analysis could continue: one notes with interest, for example, the comtesse's observation that eating a boiled egg was the ultimate test of table manners: "Take a man, set him before me to eat a boiled egg, and I will tell you his social class."'38 In this case one has few worries that those at table will fail to demonstrate the requisite level of skill- this even though the man in question has not yet appeared. His qualities are nonetheless clearly attested by his surround-

ings, which in his absence function as his attributes. In this sense, accordingly, his absence was as unproblematic (could

be taken as typical) as the meal which awaited him. When Monet wrote that he intended to show his son surrounded by female figures, comme de juste, his sense of what was fitting elided with the ruling wisdom of the day, which saw the home not just as the site of child care, but as given over to all the duties of middle-class females and their minions-to domestic service in its widest sense.39 The range of those tasks is distilled to an essence in this instance: they are shown quite unaffectedly revolving around the all-too-demanding son and heir-comme dejuste.

Monet's securing of the syntax of his picture thus happens at the level of assertions concerning the nature of middle- class life: it is the careful interlocking of those assertions, the

tight weave of the (literally) familiar, the homely, and the accessible that makes the picture seem already known, even

comfortably inevitable. It is in this sense more than any other, I think, that Monet can be seen to be correcting Manet. Here, as in the earlier Dejeuner, the revision is a matter of tying down, or at least tightening, the interrelation-

ships of the parts of a picture so that it proceeds according to a logic that Monet's imagined viewer would be comfortable in following (hence the last-minute transformation of the visitor; her social identity is thus usefully clarified as external to the essential family nucleus). There is little doubt that Manet imagined the responses of his viewers in a rather different light. The kind of syntactical strain he put on his

pictures, decentering the logic of their relationships away from artistic convention toward fantasy, in the case of his first

Dejeuner, or toward sheer undecidability as its own form of social description, in the case of the second, unseats any assurance that their order-and therefore their social order-is already known.

At this point it is necessary to circle back once again to Monet's chair, or perhaps even to Seitz's intuition that Le

Dejeuner is a self-portrait without the portrait. The picture is several other things as well, as I have tried to show, but it is

certainly also "personal." Accordingly I want to turn now to a consideration of its personal aspects--or, more precisely stated, to an analysis of Le Dejeuner as an articulation of Monet's subjectivity. Subjectivity, let me hasten to say, in the sense defined by Emile Benveniste: "the subjectivity we are

34. Bassinville, 91-92: "On ne doitjamais, comme on le fait dans beaucoup de maisons et surtout en province, servir un repas compose entierement de viandes, lors meme qu'elles seraient tres vari&es." 35.J. P. Aron, Le Mangeur du XIXe simcle, Paris, 1973, 134. Aron cites (8; from Paris-Restaurant, in Les Petits-Paris, Paris, 1854, 21-22) the commonly held Second Empire opinion on the democratiza- tion of French eating habits during the period: "on vit la gastronomie descendre insensiblement dans le tiers &tat etjusque dans la petite bourgeoisie." 36. Bassinville, 93: "Moins bien servi que ses parents." 37. The servant's costume, especially her cap with its two streamers, seems to signal her status as a domestic with particular charge of the infant. The cap, moreover, is a professional rather than a regional identifier. My thanks to Sylvie Legrand, Conservateur, Muse National des Arts et Tradi- tions Populaires, and Ren&e Davray Piekolek, Con- servateur, Mus&e de la Mode et du Costume de la

Ville de Paris, for their opinions on the costume. 38. Bassinville, 121: "Prenez un homme, faites-lui manger un oeuf a la coque devant moi et je vous dirai a quelle classe de la societe il appartient." 39. Domestic-economy manuals, as they were called, proliferated in France during the 1860s, as is documented by the governmental journal of record, Bibliographie de la France, which annually notes their titles, authors, and publishers. They range from cookery books (La Cuisine pour tous, La Cuisiniere moderne, La Minagere modeste, traiti com- plet de cuisine bourgeoise, Le Diner de tous les jours), to instruction in household accounting, more general treatises on female education (Dupont, Une Educa- tion de femme, or Boutin, Sur l'ducation intime de la femme), and child-care manuals (Mme Cuvillier- Fleury, La Petite Maman, C. Fallet, Le Testament d'une mire). There even appears a listing for LAnge dans la maison, 1868, a French version by Alexis

Eym6ry of a familiar English title, Coventry Pat- more's The Angel in the House (1854-58)-this last

not a manual, but rather a novelized exemplum of womanly virtue. Some writers, like Bassinville, were especially active in the production of a discourse of the family; with Mme de Renneville and Mile Zeniide Fleuriot, she was editor of the magazine La Famille, founded in 1865. Its opinions are quite close to those of other experts, such as Mile C. Arnoult, author of La Femme essentielle: Etude de moeurs, Blois, 1866, and La Vie reelle, ou La Femme dans lafamille et lafemme dans le monde, Blois, 1867: "Si la famille est maintenant plus que jamais le premier element et le dernier rempart de la soci-

ete, c'est, il nous semble, une consideration digne de fixer I'attention. Essayer de reproduire la femme dans la famille, c'est entrer dans l'esprit du Chris- tianisme, qui, ayant affranchi la femme dujoug des rejuges et des lois barbares, lui a rendu toute la dignit' de sa nature, afin qu'elle soit pour ainsi dire la legislatrice de cet ensemble qui constitue la famille, selon l'ordre de la nature perfectionn&e par la religion . .. dans la famille, la femme est la source, le but et le lien" (Arnoult, 1867, 7).




discussing here is the capacity to posit oneself as 'subject'... that 'subjectivity' is only the emergence in the being of a fundamental property of language. 'Ego' is he who says 'ego.' That is where we see the foundation of 'subjectivity,' which is determined by the linguistic status of 'person.' "40 To import this concept into an extralinguistic context, into the analysis of a painting, demands some confidence that it can be useful to think of an image as an utterance, and also that a notion of "the linguistic status of 'person' " has some purchase on more than just the primary scenario of the entry of the child into language; rather it is a category both established and maintained through time, in language use broadly speaking. I have already tried to show one way in which, through painting Le Dijeuner, Monet insisted on the category of "the

figure painter Monet." Such insistence, I believe, overlapped with a more deep-seated claim about the category "Monet" tout court. "Ego" is he who says "ego."

Any assertions about Monet's subjectivity are necessarily constrained on several fronts: not only is there the problem of limited evidence to confront; there is also the even greater difficulty of how such evidence as does exist might best be

interpreted. (Despite the apparently "personal" nature of some sources-for example, Monet's own biographical mus-

ings-they can be shown to conform with great exactititude to the standard biographical formulas enunciated long ago by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz.)41 Where does the personal start and stop? Which documents best reveal it? But in the end this is not an exercise in asking the "real" Monet please to stand up. The power of Benveniste's definition of subjectivity as constituted in language lies for our purposes in the concomitant notion that the subjective is therefore routinely to be encountered as representation.

In 1868 Claude Monet was twenty-eight years old. None- theless it is no exaggeration to say that who he was, or was to

be, was still a matter of debate within his family circle, as well as in the world of his chosen occupation. It is easy, as the Monet literature demonstrates, to see those domestic argu- ments as offering particular evidence in the general case of a

rebellious, free-spirited avant-garde determined to break with the stuffy mores of an older generation. It is more relevant for our purposes, however, to recognize that Mon-

et's squabbles with his family were, first of all, profoundly implicated in the construction of his own identity. How is a

person known in the world? By conduct, by actions: "It is only his actions, his conduct, which can have in our eyes a favorable or unfavorable significance."42 This is Monet's father, faced with his son's misconduct, discussing with Bazille the conditions under which Claude could gain his

regard: serious work, rapid advancement, pecuniary re- wards, honorable behavior (this last, according to Monet

pore, involved abandoning Doncieux, then six months preg- nant). Such was the way of the world, he wrote, speaking from

experience; a widower since 1857, he would not marry until 1870 the mother of a child he had fathered in 1860.43 But

strictly speaking, it is not correct to say that Monet's father wrote of the steps Claude could take to straighten things out, since he called his son Oscar, as he had since his birth.

Accordingly, Monet's decision to establish his name as a

painter ensured that it would not be the one by which his father knew him.

A minor detail, certainly, but one which can be overlaid by other episodes with implications for our understanding of Monet's subjectivity. Chief among these are his efforts at caricature, the portraits charges of notaries and lawyers and others of the male denizens of middle-class Le Havre. These works have long stood as further evidence of Monet's

teenage rebellion: he developed his talent doodling in school and sold its products for a ticket to Paris and the life of an artist. This standard view of events has hitherto deflected more pointed questions concerning the episode. Unexam- ined, it functions merely as a representative incident in the

development of an artistic original: "Monet drew in the way he liked, not in the way he was taught. His bent was towards caricature."44 There is a kind of transparency implicit here

linking Monet's will, his caricatures, and the unfettered artist's self. But surely the implication of "drawing what one likes" is not sheer self-directedness, especially when the kind of drawing Monet "liked" was caricature. Monet's operations as a caricaturist were necessarily both aggressive and defen-

sive, with the aim of his satirical efforts (following Kris) the diffusion of the strong charge of affect produced in confront-

ing-in seeing-another individual.45 Caricature is a kind of

protective device or strategy meant actively to deflect or

dispel the threat presented by another person. The caricaturist's aim is to distance himself from that other subjectivity by distorting it. Such distance is imaginary, of course; it is a

fantasy of power, with fantastical results which, regardless of the success of the caricature, always remain fantastical. (Note too that when these drawings were signed, it was always by "Oscar.")

The impulse which made Monet the satirist of Le Havre's business class went with him to Paris and, I think, stayed operative in his art even after he redefined its character and ambitions. There was still, on the one hand, that same need to control the objects of his vision, both people and land-

scape, and on the other, the necessity somehow to deflect or circumvent the threat involved in confrontation with the individual before him. In fact I would argue that these

patterns of control and avoidance, which track Monet's effort to secure an imaginative distance from his subject, structure his work with the figure. How else might we explain the

repetitive insistent morphology of the 1860s figures: men and women, whether alone or in groups, shown in profile or

three-quarter view or, very often, with their batks turned

40. E. Benveniste, as cited in K. Silverman, The

Subject of Semiotics, Oxford, 1983, 1. The following discussion is indebted to Silverman's useful treat- ment of the subject, 126ff. 41. Compare, for example, the interview con- ducted by F. Thiebault-Sisson with Monet (published in Le Temps, Nov. 27, 1900; in translation as "Claude Monet as a Young Man," Art News Annual, xxvi, 1957, 126-28, 196-99, and in C. F. Stuckey,

ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, 204- 18) with the analysis of artists' biographies offered

by E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, New Haven, 1979, esp. 8-9, 13-26, 28-30, 91-132. Monet recounts his youth in terms provided by the

repetitions and conventions of artists' biographies; to cite Kris and Kurz, 132: "Biographies record

typical events, on the one hand, and thereby shape the fate of a particular professional class, on the other hand." 42. Poulain, 74: "Ce sont seulement ces actions, sa conduite qui peuvent avoir a nos yeux une impor- tance favorable ou defavorable." 43. Wildenstein, I, 55, n. 379.




foursquare to the painter? Their gaze seldom meets the

spectator's eyes, because it seldom met the eyes of the artist. Such repeated and invariable strategies distinguish Monet from the other figural artists of the day-think of Degas in the 1860s, or Corot. Or think of Manet, above all. Here is another "semantic difference," certainly, but overlaid as it is with Monet's vehement distaste for portraiture, it seems not

entirely intentional on his part. Rather, it points to a

pronounced lack of willingness to confront other egos, other

subjects, particularly as he painted; he did not mean to be looked at as he looked. Of course it points in other directions as well: toward the influence of Courbet, for example, for whom the figure with back turned-as in the 1849 Casseurs de

pierre (destroyed), the 1853 Baigneuses (Montpellier), the 1855 Cribleuses de bl" (Nantes), and the 1868 La Source

(Louvre)-is a repeated device; or toward the influence of

contemporary fashion prints.46 These references point to the kind of thinking with which art history has hitherto been most comfortable. Yet while they certainly are not wrong, they operate with very limited models of motivation and of

explanation. I want to claim by contrast that Monet's characteristic

deployment of the figure in painting depends on deep- structured and psychically necessary responses to the actual situation of painting-responses, that is, to the stresses of confrontation between the painter and his object/subject. These psychological factors, moreover, must be thought of as

keying the availability and relevance of what art history sees as "influences"-in this case, of Courbet, fashion prints, and even Vermeer's compositional structures. It is in the psychological sense that we may most usefully call these choices

"personal," though the irony is that this "personal" aspect motivates exactly those strategies which keep his subjects at a certain distance from his gaze.

This is an odd constraint for a figure painter to labor under, the fear of being looked at while one paints, and it is

provocative to think of it in connection with Monet's other habits and practices as an artist. He is not known to have worked frequently from hired models, out of motives, it is

usually thought, which were chiefly economic. Was his

unwillingness to spend money on models perhaps not shored up by an anxious preference for familiar faces, even if these faces were ultimately to be turned away? And may we not wonder if the ways he used those same few friends

interchangeably-recostuming and repositioning them within his canvases in masquerades apparently likewise undertaken for economic motives-did not function to secure a certain

imaginative or psychic distance from the personalities and relationships involved? The results are still legible in the two most blatant examples of such masquerade, the Dejeuner sur

l'herbe and Femmes aujardin, in the odd anonymity of the one and the stiffness of the other. Yet to an eye familiar with

Bazille's and Doncieux's features, reminders of their individu-

ality occasionally show through the make-believe. The impos- sible length of Bazille's lanky figure provided the measure for half of the men in the Dejeuner; for Doncieux, it is her distinctive hairstyle, with its little tongue of black dipping down before her ear, which gives the game away.47

I want to argue that in Le Dejeuner, the painting we are

taught to think of as among the most "personal" of Monet's career, these various attitudes, procedures, and devices are

very much in play; its "personal" aspect is founded on the various means Monet had arrived at, not only for declaring his art his own, but also for making that declaration possible in paint. Just as Le Dejeuner is a work by Monet, not Manet, it is a picture by Claude, not Oscar. It asserts the possibility of

arguing against the paternal prohibition--of effectively ne-

gating it-through one's art. That argument is built around the painter's son, whom the painter's father had recom- mended disowning. And the painter's mistress is there as

well, though not, curiously enough, playing the role right- fully hers, as the mother of Monet's son. Instead, a neighbor posed for the mother and Doncieux was cast as the visitor, a

figure decidedly external to the little scene of happy domestic mundanity, though apparently welcome in it. Dressed in street clothes, leaning with easy formality against the win-

dow, it is as if she is poised to leave when the man of the house appears. In the meantime, she stands quietly, her face obscured by a dotted veil-through which, nonetheless, that characteristic tongue of hair appears. Doncieux is clearly a visitor; yet the symbols of wifely duty-uncannily enough- have sought her out. She stands hemmed in by work basket, child's doll, and dinner table, from which-and this is the last straw-the crusty loaf thrusts at her, with all too phallic menace.

The game of mime and role playing is unmistakable. It

brings home the extent to which the apparent veracity and

stability of the picture (the doll is little Jean's doll, and the bamboo dining chairs likewise part of the painter's household effects) are in fact imaginary and founded on a series of

displacements: Monet is displaced from his role of father and de facto husband (even though his place at table is kept always ready), and Doncieux from her identity as wife and mother. As a result Jean, though not an orphan, is certainly another woman's child. Of course these disguises and substi-

tutions were not meant to be legible in public; they were addressed not so much to us as to Monet himself, who

engineered them precisely in order to secure the psychic space necessary to look at his models and paint his picture. A set of imaginary relations were thus substituted for actual ones, and pursued with real intensity. An effort was made to convince. An image of bourgeois domestic bliss emerged

44. X. Lathom, Claude Monet, London, 1931, 2. Although this is not a distinguished piece of work (most of its information is lifted more or less directly from M. de Fels's rather more careful biography, La Vie de Claude Monet, Paris, 1929), its repetitions are those of most biographies of the artist. 45. E. Kris, "The Psychology of Caricature," in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York, 1952.

This reference to the London edition, 1953, 173- 88. 46. For a discussion of Monet's relations with Cour- bet, see J. Isaacson, Monet: Le Dejeuner sur i'herbe, London, 1972, 28-33, 51-56, and passim; it is worth noting that this relationship continued through 1870, when Courbet was a witness to Monet's marriage to Doncieux (Wildenstein, I, 46). The relationship with fashion illustration is treated

by M. Roskill in "Early Impressionism and the Fashion Print," Burlington Magazine, cxiI, June 1970, 391-95. 47. Monet's profile portrait of Doncieux (1866, Buhrle Collection; Wildenstein, I, no. 64) is the clearest extant record of her features.




thereby, but it was dependent on a fantasy about a well- attended baby, two false mothers, and a father who is always out of sight. And its invented order turns out to be that of the culture at large.

Figure painting, for Monet, meant securing a narrative of

bourgeois sociability: first, in his DIjeuner sur l'herbe, describ-

ing its up-to-the-minute public form as leisure, and then, a few years later in Le Dejeuner, attending to its domestic guise. In both cases, moreover, that narrative was to be founded on an illusion of the cogency of its visual distinctions as to age and sex and class, familial roles, social status, and dependency; this is the essence of the story Monet has to tell. And, almost as recompense for the lack of other content-no dramas of devotion or betrayal-the social narrative was to be grounded in the painter's claim to offer, as his own special tokens of achievement, a set of discriminations proper to

sight: color and texture, surface and pattern, transparency and solidity. I saw this, the painter Monet states; and we believe him, taking the squares in the damask cloth and the

light passing through cruets and the warm, mat, oval eggs as witness to that previous act of sight. But lay this visual testament over another set of facts, the accommodations and

arrangements necessary to paint the scene: the props as they wilted and went stale; the poses coaxed out of a fractious infant; the neighbor and mother and bonne summoned- sometimes separately, sometimes together-from their own

daily chores. The result is recognition of the ways in which a coherent domestic fiction was made to emerge from a less than orderly daily routine. It did not come easily, and the

difficulty of forcing fiction from fact left its traces in the

picture itself, not just in devices such as the child's doll abandoned beneath a chair, where the painter seems to

capitalize on household clutter, but, more significantly, in the repeated reconsiderations and reworkings that encrust the picture's surface.

Yet I do not believe that we should think of Monet's difficulties here as simply or only practical; they are not the

result, as is sometimes argued concerning the first Dejeuner, of the particular audacity and risk involved in the formal

project the painter set himself.48 On the contrary, they were

as much programmatic as painterly; they arose in the wake of the difficult intersection of the various aspects of Monet's identities as a painter and as a man. As a painter, Monet was intent on offering his own identifiable intervention in a

practice of modern painting, a contribution which, though it rested on an imaginary domesticity, on representing the

"normal" life of the bourgeois family, aimed to undercut its

imaginary status by grounding it in observed phenomena. In other words, Monet painted the fiction which the bourgeoisie most treasured about itself: the fiction of family life. He did so as a realist, as a rather literal-minded follower of Courbet and a rival to Manet, who in working meant to put into

practice his chosen motto: he would look at and represent the knowable, what "he personally" had experienced, in the domestic sphere. But the necessity of looking and the

programmatic endorsement of the bourgeois belief in the

family did not sit well with other aspects of Monet's identity: his personal circumstances, which went against those two

founding requirements of the family, marriage and legitimate offspring; and his fundamental discomfort with looking at the human objects of his painting, especially when they looked back at him. So a complex fiction was invented to channel and reroute the affect and discomfort provoked by the steps necessary to becoming the figure painter Monet. First "personal experience" was pressed into a mold borrowed from Vermeer, and the traces of the debt obscured by working at large scale and from life. And then "life" itself had to be reshaped: Monet's relationship with Camille Doncieux was submitted to a kind of covert disclaimer, even while a clear contrary claim to Jean's identity as his son was being stated.

It might be argued that the fact that Le Dejeuner was

painted at all bears witness to the strength of Monet's identification with his offspring; it is even possible to imagine that this image of a male child with his various surrogate mothers took the painter back to his own childhood and the

doting ministrations of his mother and childless aunt; moreover the absence of any adult male competitor helps to shore

up a sense of a fantasy of plenitude and pleasure. Such a

reading, what is more, would perhaps best fit with Freud's

concept of artistic activity as a regressive fantasy of gratifica- tion. Yet if Monet's picture was a fantasy, it is too simple to see it, as Freud might wish, as a therapeutic one. Rather I want to claim that Monet both is in the picture and acts

through the picture, unconsciously constructing fantasy and

subjectivity at one and the same time; that overlap was not

especially curative. In fact, it is because Le Dijeuner marked the difficult point of intersection between unresolved aspects of Monet's identity-painter, father, son, lover, rival, realist- that it turned out to be his last figure painting: the last of his

pictures to aim at imaging both the forms and the contents of modern life. The collision at that intersection rerouted his

conception of the terrain proper to modern painting; in the

territory of landscape, problems of the personal could be

kept more strictly under control. A fictive control, to be sure: the impersonality of Monet's

landscapes, their "devotion to natural phenomena," is their central pretense, not their truth. Monet's landscapes insist that they have no attitude toward their subjects; their

exemplary modernism lies in the fact that they purport to see

faithfully, directly, intensely-regardless of personal circumstance. And of course Monet did need to see what he painted; poplars and cathedrals and grainstacks had to be there outside the window-even if their physical presence did not mean that they would then appear on the canvas in any simple way. As painted, Monet's nature was more spectacular than simple. But nonetheless he offered it as fidelity, not invention.

Le Dejeuner, too, mixes invention and observation-yet according to a recipe which Monet would not repeat. That he did not matters for several reasons-not least because the

failure (on the part of this most obsessive of painters) helps undo our sense of the anachronistic, even banal familiarity of

48. The most sustained version of this argument is

by Isaacson (as in n. 46), esp. chaps. 2, 6.




its depiction of family life. It helps to turn Le Dijeuner back into a fiction again, and a historical one at that: a domestic

idyll concocted out of pleasure, anxiety, avoidance, paternal affection, ambition, the will to mastery, and more. Nor could it have reflected a reality that never existed. If anything, Monet's actual family was more typical than this painting of

family life. Yet paint them in a way that would reveal their

passions and errors and weaknesses he could not-unlike Manet and Degas, for example, who would try longer and harder to fulfill that task. Why does this failure matter?

Perhaps it means only that some artists are more successful at certain kinds of tasks than others. It certainly means that

figure painting was and is hard pressed to be made to

represent what the novel has proved it can usually show better: making a modern figure painting has not turned out to be easy for any artist.

Yet Monet's failure is not a matter of too little genius or a

used-up genre. Rather, it is exemplary because it is sited so near the heart of the "holy" family; considering how and why Monet could not both be in a modern family and paint one contaminates our conception of the predicaments of artistic

practice in a useful way. If prizing apart the layers of the

problem helps to understand it, another notion may have benefited from similar unpacking: Monet. To recognize that Monet both paints a picture and is produced within it is to underline the disjunctions between those complementary conditions: this is why we take painting to be revelatory of more than the artist's self. The "personal," too, is a wider

category than it might at first seem. The artist conjures plenitude, yet is signified by his absence; his identity results from the various displacements, surrogates, and projections that naturalize his omission from the scene, and secure his

possession of it through an act of sight. He is male. He and the viewer are one and the same. Their chair is empty. Does it look less comfortable than it once did?

Appendix Monet to Bazille, Etretat, December 1868 (Wildenstein, I, 425-26)

Mon cher ami,

Comme je vous l'ai dit dans mon petit griffonage, je suis trbs content, tras enchant&. Jejouis comme un vrai coq en pate, car je suis ici entour% de tout ce quej'aime. Je passe mon temps en plein air sur le galet quand il fait bien gros temps ou bien que les bateaux s'en vont i la peche, ou bien je vais dans la campagne qui est si belle ici, que je trouve peut-etre plus agr~able encore I'hiver que l'6td, et naturellement je travaille pendant tout ce temps, et je crois que cette ann&e je vais faire des choses s~rieuses. Et puis le soir, mon cher ami,je trouve dans ma petite maisonnette un bon feu et une bonne petite famille. Si vous voyiez votre filleul comme il est gentil t present. Mon cher, c'est ravissant de voir pousser ce petit etre, et, ma foi, je suis bien heureux de l'avoir. Je vais le peindre pour le Salon avec d'autres figures autour comme de juste. Je vais faire cette ann&e deux tableaux de figures, un int(rieur avec b~b% et deux femmes, et des matelots en plein air, et je veux faire cela d'une fagon %patante. Grace i ce monsieur du Havre qui me vient en aide,je

jouis de la plus parfaite tranquillit% puisque d~barrass6 de

tracas, aussi mon desir serait de rester toujours ainsi, dans un coin de nature bien tranquille comme ici. Je vous assure que je ne vous envie pas d'etre

' Paris, et les reunions [du Caf6

Guerbois] ne me manquent guere, quoique cependant j'aurais du plaisir a voir quelques-uns des habitues, mais franchementje crois que bien mauvais [ce] que l'on ne peut bien faire dans un pareil milieu; ne croyez vous pas qu'a meme la nature seule on fasse mieux? Moi, j'en suis stir. Du reste, j'ai toujours pense ainsi, et ce quej'ai fini dans ces conditions a toujours %te mieux.

On est trop preoccupe de ce que l'on voit et de ce que l'on entend '

Paris, si fort que l'on soit, et ce que je ferai ici a au moins le merite de ne ressembler A personne, du moins je le crois, parce que ce sera simplement l'expression de ce que j'aurai ressenti, moi personnellement. Plus je vais, plus je regrette le peu que je sais, c'est cela qui gene le plus, c'est certain. Plus je vais, plus je m'aperlois que jamais on n'ose exprimer franchement ce que l'on eprouve. C'est dr6le. Voila pourquoi je suis doublement heureux d'etre ici et je crois bien que je ne viendrai de longtemps a Paris maintenant, un mois tout au plus chaque ann&e.

J'espere que vous aussi tes plein d'ardeur et que vous devenez tout a fait piocheur. C'est si bete de perdre son temps volontairement. Vous qui etes dans de si belles conditions, vous devriez faire de merveilles. Heureux mortel, dites moi ce que vous aurez au Salon et si vous etes content.

Je vous recommande mes toiles qui sont chez vous. J'en ai tant perdu que je tiens a celles qui me restent. Du reste je vous ai debarass% du plus grand, et si vous voulez me faire un plaisir cherchez dans tous vos recoins les toiles [blanches] que j'ai encore chez vous et aussi les toiles oui il y a des choses

abandonn(es tel que votre portrait en pied et une autre toile de 60 oii j'avais fait de mauvaises fleurs. Cherchez et envoyez-moi tout ce que vous verrez dont je puisse me servir. Voyez cela de suite, mon cher ami, vous me rendrez service, carje travaille tant que le peu de toiles que j'avais est presque use, et voila Carpentier que vient de me fermer mon credit et me voila oblige d'acheter au comptant et vous ne savez pas ce que cela cofite.

N'oubliez pas de vous occuper de cela et &crivez moi.

Je vous serre la main, ainsi qu'a [illisible]. Tout a vous, Claude Monet Mes amities ' M. Maitre.

P.S. Vous adresserez les toiles au Havre, rue Fontenelle 13. N'oubliez pas.

Frequently Cited Sources

Bassinville, La comtesse de, Le Conseiller des bonnes menageres: Almanach

perpituel; Vademecum des femmes economes a la ville et a' la campagne, Paris, 1868.

Champa, K., Studies in Early Impressionism, New Haven/London, 1973. Poulain, G., Bazille et ses amis, Paris, 1932. Wildenstein, D., Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonnd, 5 vols.,

Lausanne, 1974-91.

Anne M. Wagner is professor of modern art and chairs the

Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author ofJean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1986) and Three Artists (Three Women) (to appear in 1995), and of many essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art [Department of History ofArt, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720].



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