The Tuileries (Study)

Les Tuileries, étude (The Tuileries, Study) is a view by Claude Monet looking down over the Tuileries Garden in Paris toward the Left Bank, its trees and lawns caught in a warm, low light under a streaked golden sky. Signed Claude Monet 75 but dated about 1876 by the French national records, and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 403, it was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, belonged to Gustave Caillebotte, and is now in the Musée d'Orsay.

What you're looking at

The canvas is a high, wide panorama. In the foreground a rounded bush of rust, orange and olive leaves rises at lower left, its colors suggesting autumn. Beyond it, the garden opens out in pale green-gray lawns and gravel walks crossed by long blue-green shadows, with small clumps of orange-touched trees scattered across them and a band of pinkish sand or water glinting at the left. A dense line of dark green trees runs across the middle, closing the garden.

Above the trees, on the horizon, a domed building and a pair of slender spires stand out faintly against the sky, probably the towers of the city across the Seine. The sky takes up the upper third and is the boldest passage: long, sweeping diagonal strokes of yellow, ocher, olive and gold, as if the air were thick with low sun or haze. The signature and the figure 75 are at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

In 1876 Monet painted several views of the Tuileries Garden from above, working from the apartment of his collector and friend Victor Chocquet at 198 rue de Rivoli, which overlooked the garden. The finished, brighter version, The Tuileries in the Musée Marmottan Monet, shows the same garden in spring sunshine with the Louvre's pavilions. This Orsay canvas is called a study in the state's catalogue, and its rough, summary handling and dark, golden tonality support that. The inscription 75 and the 1876 dating of the Chocquet views do not quite agree, so it is best dated about 1875–76.

How it was painted

The paint is thick and loose, laid in with broad strokes that leave the shapes of trees and lawns unresolved. Monet keeps the palette to greens, ochers and rusts with blue-green shadows, unusual for him in these years, and lets the diagonal hatching of the sky carry the light. At 50 by 75 centimeters, it is a fairly large canvas for a study, and he thought enough of it to exhibit it in 1877.

How it compares

Where the Marmottan Tuileries is bright and clear, this version is warm, dim and atmospheric. It belongs to the small group of Monet's Paris views from these years, made from high windows and balconies: the earlier Boulevard des Capucines and, the following year, the Saint-Lazare station pictures of the Gare Saint-Lazare series. The high viewpoint over a garden also anticipates his later pictures of his own garden from the house at Giverny.

Victor Chocquet

Victor Chocquet, a customs official of modest means, was one of the first and most loyal collectors of the Impressionists, buying works by Renoir, Monet and especially Cézanne at a time when they sold for very little. His apartment on the rue de Rivoli, on an upper floor facing the Tuileries, offered Monet a ready-made high viewpoint over one of the most famous gardens in Paris. The Tuileries pictures are among the few Monet painted in the center of the city. See Claude Monet's life in paintings.

Ownership and where to see it

The canvas belonged to Gustave Caillebotte, the painter and patron who bought many of his friends' works. His bequest to the French state, accepted in 1894, brought it to the Musée du Luxembourg in 1896; it later passed to the Louvre and in 1986 to the Musée d'Orsay (inventory RF 2705). For other works by Monet there, see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay.