In the summer of 1874, Claude Monet was living in
Argenteuil, a suburb on the Seine some seven miles north of Paris, and
Édouard Manet was spending time at his family’s property in nearby
Gennevilliers, just across the river.
Édouard Manet: Olympia, 1863
Monet had first crossed Manet’s path at the Salon of 1865, where
confusion resulted owing to the regulation of hanging works
alphabetically by artists’ names. There Manet showed his highly
controversial nude Olympia.
Claude Monet: A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight, 1864
At the Salon, Monet’s two large seascapes had been placed near the
older artist’s work, and the Monets were much admired. Infuriated at
being congratulated for Monet’s seascapes, Manet apparently exclaimed,
“Who is this rascal who pastiches my painting so basely?”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Édouard Manet: Woman with a Parrot, 1866
Monet, for his part, was dismissive of Manet’s Woman with a Parrot—Zola considered it the best of his recent paintings—writing to Frédéric Bazille in June 1867 that “La Femme rose is bad, his earlier work is better than what he is doing at the moment.”
Édouard Manet: Argenteuil, 1874
Yet there can be no doubt of Manet’s artistic and affective
complicity with Monet at Argenteuil in the summer of 1874. Dazzling and
virtuosic, Manet’s painting Argenteuil is louche and playful at
the same time, with its lusty canotier balancing his companion’s
parasol over their adjacent laps, her millinery confection, as T.J.
Clark has written, a “wild twist of tulle, piped onto the oval like
cream on a cake.” Routinely identified as the “drill sergeant” of the
Impressionists—despite his refusal to participate in any of their
exhibitions—it is clear that Manet now intended to come out (as it were)
and show solidarity with the fledgling avant-garde, including such
painters as Monet and Renoir.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Édouard Manet: Boating, 1874
The second Argenteuil boating picture, also likely completed in the
summer of 1874 but held back until the Salon of 1879, suggests something
of a withdrawal from Monet’s shimmering chromatic language.
Édouard Manet: The Grand Canal of Venice, 1875
Paradoxically, Manet’s most fully realized Impressionist
landscapes—done far from Argenteuil and Monet—are the two dazzling views
of Venice’s Grand Canal, painted in Tissot’s company in the autumn of
1875
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Joan Whitney Payson
Édouard Manet: The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil, 1874
On July 23, Manet had been invited to paint en plein air in the
garden of Monet’s rented villa on the rue Pierre Guienne (a house that
Manet had found for him three years earlier). In a vibrating, high-keyed
canvas, Manet portrayed Camille Monet and their seven-year-old son Jean
seated on the lawn, with Monet in his painter’s smock tending to the
flowers behind them. As Sauerländer observes in one of his most
endearing insights, a cock, hen, and chick line up in the left
foreground, affectionately paraphrasing the family as in an animal fable.
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