The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil

The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil is Claude Monet's 1881 painting of the sunflower-lined path and steps of the house he rented at Vétheuil, on the Seine northwest of Paris, with his younger son Michel standing in the sun. The large upright canvas, 151.5 × 121 cm, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.45), and is number 685 in Wildenstein's catalogue.

What does The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil show?

The picture is built on a single line. A path of pale, sun-bleached sand starts at the bottom edge, as wide as the canvas almost, and narrows as it climbs to a flight of steps and the house at the top. Both sides are walls of sunflowers, many of them taller than an adult, their heads painted as thick discs of chrome and orange yellow around darker centers. Below them, the borders are a tangle of grasses, gladioli-like spikes and loose green leaves.

At the foot of the composition, two big blue-and-white glazed pots anchor the corners, one at lower left half lost in shadow and one at lower right in full light. Their dragon-like blue decoration is set down in a few curling strokes. They act like the bases of columns, and they push the rest of the garden back.

Halfway up the path stands a small boy in a white smock and a wide yellow straw hat, with a toy cart on the sand in front of him. He is usually identified as Michel Monet, born in March 1878, so about three years old here. Higher up, at the foot of the steps, two more figures are sketched in white against the house: a woman and a smaller child, generally taken to be members of the Hoschedé family who shared the household.

Light, color and brushwork

The light comes from high on the right, and it is a hot, late-summer light. The path is not painted as a uniform beige: it is a weave of cream, pink, lilac and pale blue, with long bluish shadows of the plants falling across it. That violet in the shadows is the complementary of the yellow above, and it makes the sunflowers burn brighter.

The sky is unusually deep, a saturated cobalt with white cumulus. Monet keeps it as a narrow band, pressed down onto the gray-blue roof and the red chimney stacks, so the flowers seem to crowd up into it. The leaves are done with fast, flicking strokes of blue-green, and in places the canvas shows through.

The signature at lower right reads Claude Monet with a date. According to the National Gallery of Art, the canvas is inscribed 1880, a date it considers mistaken, added when Monet repainted parts of the foreground; the museum dates the picture to 1881. Conservators at the National Gallery spent months removing a discolored natural-resin varnish before a 2018 display, restoring the contrast between thick and thin paint and patches of bare canvas in the sky.

Monet at Vétheuil

Monet moved to Vétheuil in 1878 with his wife Camille, their sons Jean and Michel, and Alice Hoschedé and her six children, after the bankruptcy of Alice's husband Ernest, once Monet's patron. Money was very short. Camille died there in September 1879, the subject of Camille Monet on Her Deathbed, and the winter that followed brought the frozen river and somber views like The Church in Vétheuil in Winter.

By the summer of 1881 the mood had changed. Sunflowers appear again and again in Monet's work from these months, in the garden and indoors in Bouquet of Sunflowers, now at the Met. In December 1881 the combined family left Vétheuil for Poissy, and in 1883 settled at Giverny, so this garden is one of the last things he painted in the village.

How many versions are there?

Monet painted the view four times. The National Gallery's canvas is the largest. A smaller version, 100.3 × 81.3 cm, is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and the other two are in private collections. The Norton Simon picture was long thought to be a study for Washington's, but technical examination has questioned that order: it is more heavily worked, with green laid over cobalt in the sky. The two public versions were shown side by side for the first time at the National Gallery in 2018.

Compared with Monet's Garden at Argenteuil of 1873, also in Washington, the Vétheuil garden is steeper and more enclosed. It is a corridor of flowers, and the child gives it its scale.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. For other museums with major holdings by Claude Monet, see our guide to where to see Monet's paintings. For the same village in other moods, see View of Vétheuil and Plum Trees in Bloom.