Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse

Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse is Claude Monet's 1872 portrait of his elder son, then about five, sitting on a toy horse mounted on a three-wheeled iron frame in the family garden at Argenteuil. The canvas, 60.6 by 74.3 centimeters and signed and dated "Claude Monet. 1872." at lower right, has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2000. It is number 238 in Wildenstein's catalogue of Monet's paintings.

What does Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse show?

Jean sits bolt upright on a cream-colored wooden horse, turned three-quarters toward us, and stares out of the picture with the round-eyed, slightly stubborn look of a child told to keep still. The horse is carved in mid-gallop, front legs thrust forward and back legs kicked out, with a white mane, a red bridle and a red harness strap looped around its chest. It is fixed to an iron frame running on spoked wheels: two smaller ones under the horse's head, one partly hidden behind the other, and a large one at the rear. Monet draws the wheels with a care he gives nothing else in the picture, spoke by spoke, their dark iron rims catching a line of light.

The boy's clothes are the clothes of a small child of his time, before boys were "breeched." He wears a brown straw hat with a red cockade, a white blouse with a broad collar, and a pinkish-beige smock over a skirt with a sash tied at the back. His white socks are striped at the top, and his dark ankle boots hang down toward the frame. His hands grip the horse's neck just behind the mane.

Around him the garden is pushed back into a single dark-green wall of shrubbery, painted in loose vertical and horizontal sweeps. At right a bush is spotted with bright red flowers, probably geraniums, the only strong color outside the figure. The ground is a gravel path in pale pink-beige, laid in with a few broad strokes, and the rear wheel casts a soft violet shadow on it.

Where and when was it painted?

Monet painted the picture in the summer of 1872, a few months after he, his wife Camille and Jean had settled in Argenteuil, a town on the Seine northwest of Paris. They had spent the Franco-Prussian War in London and the Netherlands. Back in France, sales to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel gave the family a measure of comfort for the first time, and they rented a house with a garden. A mechanical horse of this kind was not a cheap toy, and its presence here says something about those better years.

Jean, born in August 1867 before his parents married, had already appeared as a baby in Jean Monet in His Cradle. In the Argenteuil years he turns up again and again in his father's garden and meadow pictures, usually as a small figure beside Camille. This canvas is unusual in giving him the whole stage.

How was it painted?

The Met notes that the picture is freely and thinly painted, with bare canvas showing here and there. You can see this in the background, where the greens are scrubbed on so thinly that the weave shows through, and in the path, where single strokes stand for the whole surface. The figure is built more solidly. The white blouse is modeled with cool blue-gray shadows and touches of pure white on the sleeves and collar, and the smock carries pale violet in its folds, a sign that Monet was painting in open shade outdoors rather than under studio light.

The contrast in handling is the point of the picture. The toy, with its exact wheels and stiff carved legs, is described almost like an object in a catalogue, while the living garden behind is a blur of color. Jean sits between the two: carefully observed in the face and hands, more summary in the dress. The pose, square to the viewer and anchored on a strong horizontal of path and wheels, gives a small, homely subject a formal, almost heraldic look.

A family picture Monet kept

Monet never exhibited this portrait and kept it for the rest of his life. After his death it passed to Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, his stepdaughter, who had married Jean in 1897, and then through dealers to American collectors. It belongs with the private, domestic side of his Argenteuil work, alongside The Luncheon, where Jean plays on the ground beside a laid table, and The Artist's House at Argenteuil, where he stands with a hoop on the terrace. The same garden appears in The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil, painted the following summer.

Where is Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse today?

The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which received it in 2000 as a gift of the Sara Lee Corporation (accession 2000.195). Older books and websites sometimes list it as privately owned, which was true before that date. At the Met it joins a strong group of Argenteuil-period works, including Camille Monet on a Garden Bench; see our guide to Monet at the Met and the wider story of Claude Monet.