Manet Painting in Monet's Garden at Argenteuil

Manet peignant dans le jardin de Monet à Argenteuil (Manet Painting in Monet's Garden at Argenteuil) is a small, quickly painted picture by Claude Monet of his friend Édouard Manet at work in Monet's garden in the summer of 1874. Monet gave it to Manet; it later belonged to the German painter Max Liebermann, and it disappeared from Liebermann's widow's Berlin apartment in 1943. Its whereabouts have been unknown since, and it is known today only from photographs.

What you're looking at

Manet sits on the left half of the canvas, seen in profile facing right, at an easel. He wears a loose beige smock, brown trousers and a wide straw hat, and his full brown beard is visible beneath the brim. In his left hand he holds a palette, in his right a brush raised toward the canvas. The canvas on the easel stands at an angle to us, a brown rectangle whose own image is not legible.

Around him the garden closes in. A diagonal trellis or fence runs across the background at left, a slender tree trunk rises immediately in front of the easel, and branches with pale blossom or light-struck leaves spread across the top. To the right, the ground opens onto grass and shrubbery in greens, ochers and browns. The art historian Willibald Sauerländer observed that nature encloses the painter here like the walls of a studio. The handling is loose and sketch-like, and the surviving reproductions are in warm, slightly faded color. The canvas is signed Monet at lower right but not dated.

The summer of 1874

Monet had been living at Argenteuil since late 1871, in a house that Manet had helped him find. In July 1874 Manet, who had refused to join the first Impressionist exhibition that spring, came to stay nearby and painted with Monet outdoors. On one day in Monet's garden, Manet painted The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (Metropolitan Museum of Art), showing Camille and Jean Monet resting on the grass and Monet himself tending the plants. Renoir arrived, borrowed materials and painted Camille and Jean from beside Manet (National Gallery of Art, Washington). It is likely that Monet's picture of Manet at his easel was made on the same occasion, the only time the three painters are known to have worked side by side outdoors. That summer Manet also painted Monet at work in his studio boat. See Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

What can be judged from photographs suggests a rapid oil sketch on a wide canvas, 41 by 68 centimeters. The figure is blocked in with a few broad, flat planes, the foliage in quick, loaded strokes. Renate Prochno has compared the brushwork to Renoir's. Liebermann himself, writing in 1898 after he bought it, called it a sketch, but a very appealing piece of painting.

Monet's other pictures of friends and family

The canvas belongs to a small group of works in which the Impressionists painted one another at work, alongside Renoir's Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (1873) and Manet's Monet Painting in His Studio Boat (1874). Monet's own record of Argenteuil domestic life includes The Luncheon, Camille Monet on a Garden Bench and The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil. For the floating studio Manet painted that summer, see The Studio Boat.

Provenance and loss

According to the published history of the work, Monet gave the picture to Manet, who kept it until his death in 1883. His widow, Suzanne Manet, later sold it to a German buyer, refusing the dealer Ambroise Vollard; it reached the Berlin dealer Hermann Pächter, from whom Max Liebermann bought it in 1898. It hung in Liebermann's house on the Pariser Platz and from 1910 at his summer villa at Wannsee, and he kept it until his death in 1935.

His widow, Martha Liebermann, kept it in her apartment in Berlin. In March 1943, facing deportation, she took her own life. An inventory of her confiscated possessions in June 1943 listed a Monet Maler in Landschaft (painter in a landscape) valued at 10,000 Reichsmarks. The building was destroyed in an air raid that November. Whether the painting was destroyed or removed beforehand is unknown; the Liebermann heirs have claimed it since 1947. It is a lost work by Monet, and any reappearance would be subject to restitution claims.