L'Enfant à la tasse (Portrait of Jean Monet)

L'Enfant à la tasse (Child with a Cup) is a small portrait Claude Monet painted in 1868 of his son Jean, then about a year old. The child sits at a table, a chubby arm resting on the wood, beside a white bowl ringed with blue stripes. He looks away to the right with a solemn, slightly wary expression. Signed C. Monet and dated 68 at lower left, it is catalogued by Wildenstein as number 131 and is in a private collection.

What you're looking at

The picture is a close-up. The boy is seen from the chest up, turned three-quarters to the right, his head large in the frame. His fair hair is painted in a few broad, flat strokes of cream, ocher and brown, combed straight across the head. The face is modeled more carefully: pink cheeks, a small red mouth pushed forward, a bright blue-gray eye under a heavy brow. He looks as though something off to the side has caught his attention.

He wears a white smock with gray-mauve vertical stripes and short puffed sleeves, set down in thick, fast slabs of white paint that stand up from the surface. His bare forearm lies along the table edge in front of him, warm pink against the brown wood. The bowl, lower right, is the most solid object in the picture: three bands of blue around a cream body, its rim catching the light in a single highlight. The background is a flat, warm brown, brushed loosely enough that the strokes show. The paint surface has a visible network of fine cracks.

Jean Monet and a difficult year

Jean Monet was born in Paris in August 1867 to Camille Doncieux, whom Monet would marry in 1870. The family's situation was precarious. Monet's own family disapproved, money was short, and in 1868 he moved between Paris, Bonnières-sur-Seine, Fécamp, Étretat and Le Havre, often in debt. His patron in Le Havre, Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, commissioned portraits that kept him afloat; see Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert.

Jean became one of Monet's most frequent models in these years. He appears asleep in Jean Monet in His Cradle (1867), at the family table in The Lunch (1868) and astride a toy in Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse (1872). L'Enfant à la tasse is the earliest of these as a simple head-and-shoulders portrait.

How it was painted

This is a small, intimate canvas, painted quickly with a loaded brush. The handling is close to Édouard Manet's at the time: flat, frontal light, strong contrast between the whites and the dark ground, and forms built from broad patches of color rather than careful modeling. The white smock in particular, laid on in a few thick sweeps, shows how much Monet had learned from Manet's way of painting fabric. The striped bowl is a small still life in its own right, and the blue it adds is the only cool color in the picture.

The subject, a child absorbed in a moment at the table, belongs to the domestic genre that Monet explored before his work turned almost entirely to landscape in the 1870s. His Normandy pictures of the same period are covered on Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

Ownership and the Amazon sale

According to the painting's published history, it was first owned by a friend of Monet's in Le Havre, who gave it back to the artist in 1883. It later left the family and has remained in private hands. In August 2013 the picture was listed for sale on Amazon.com at US$1.45 million as part of the site's new fine-art section. The listing drew wide press attention and some skepticism about selling major paintings online. In 2018 it was lent to the Monet retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna.

Because it is privately owned, the painting can be seen only when it is lent to exhibitions. For Monet's work on public view, see where to see Monet's paintings.