Claude Monet Comes to Paris to Sell His Paintings

Written to the great Impressionist collector Victor Choquet just months after the death of Monet’s wife

Claude Monet was the founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. He was also one of the Impressionists whose fervent minds moved to the early 20th century movement, Fauvism. This style, while still focusing on natural subjects, used strong colors and bold brush strokes to elicit emotion.

Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot exhibited their work independently from the Salon; they did so under the name the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers for which Monet was a leading figure in its formation. He was inspired by the style and subject matter of his slightly older contemporaries, Pissarro and Édouard Manet. The group, whose title was chosen to avoid association with any style or movement, were unified in their independence from the Salon and rejection of the prevailing academicism. Monet gained a reputation as the foremost landscape painter of the group.

In 1876, Camille Monet became seriously ill. Their second son, Michel, was born in 1878, after which Camille’s health deteriorated further. In the autumn of that year, they moved to the village of Vétheuil where they shared a house with the family of Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts who had commissioned four paintings from Monet. In 1878, Camille was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She died September 1879 around the time one of Claude’s main benefactors stopped ordering his paintings.

Vétheuil is a country town northwest of the capital bordering the Seine river between Paris and Rouen. A farming community of 622 inhabitants some 10 kilometers from the nearest railway station, the town was noted principally for its thirteenth-century Gothic church of Notre-Dame. Throughout 1878 and 1879, Monet painted many views in and around Vétheuil, observing its various aspects across the changing months, as seasonal light brought differing effects to the town’s architecture and setting.

Still struggling after the death of his wife and experiencing financial hardship, he made plans to bring new paintings to Paris to sell.

Victor Choquet was born into a well to do family and worked in a governmental position. He would become a major collector of Impressionist materials. On March 24, 1875, he attended the historical Impressionist sale, which was organized at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. He did not buy anything there but did soon thereafter. After his death, Chocquet’s significant collection—which included thirty-two works by Cézanne, eleven by Renoir, eleven by Monet and one each by Pissarro and Sisley, as well as a number of works by Corot, Courbet, Daumier and Delacroix—was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1899.

Autograph letter signed, Vetheuil, December 28 1879, to “Cher Monsieur Choquet’. “I am coming to spend two days in Paris and to bring there a certain number of new canvases, which I would be very happy to show you. If therefore you have a free moment, you would give me great pleasure to come to my place. I will be there tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday, from 1 to 3.”

It is not possible to know which paintings Monet brought but that stretch saw him paint a number of natural scenes in and around Vetheuil.