Garden of the Princess, Louvre

Claude Monet, one of the founders of Impressionism (which takes its name from his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise), grew up on the Normandy coast, known for its rapidly changing skies. Sunlight, clouds, and the mutability of the weather were to dominate Monet's works. Known for paintings created en plein air, or outdoors, Monet worked throughout his life in Normandy, in and around Paris, and in the south of France, as well as in London, Holland, and Venice. In the 1880s, he began to spend time at Giverny, near Paris, where he created many works celebrating his water-lily pond.

Oberlin's painting, along with two other horizontal works in The Hague and Berlin, was painted by Monet in spring 1867, from windows at the Louvre. On April 27, the artist had asked for a special authorization to paint "views of Paris from the windows of the Louvre," and on May 20, he wrote the artist Frédéric Bazille that he and Renoir were still busy on their city views. His earliest images of Paris, they were painted shortly after the opening of the city's World's Fair in April and attest to its importance as a growing metropolis. Rather than copy the masterpieces inside the museum, as had generations of artists before him, Monet turned the opposite direction, toward the city itself. The work is evidence of his diverse and inspired early period, presenting a sweeping view of Paris in an unusual vertical composition that shows a slice of the city toward the southeast, through atmospheric clouds; the oblique viewpoint may have been inspired by Japanese prints the artist would have seen at the World's Fair.

The dome of the Pantheon appears in the center distance, flanked by the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont and the dome of the Sorbonne. The Ile de la Cité is in the middle ground, separated from the Right Bank by the Seine, of which a small part is visible at right, under the French flag. The foreground, painted in brilliant green, shows the Garden of the Princess (Jardin de l'Infante), named for a Spanish princess who was briefly engaged to Louis XV in 1722, and whose apartments under the Galerie d'Apollon looked out over the garden. Human figures-so prominent in Monet's works to this point-are reduced to daubs of paint, signifying their movement on foot and in horse-drawn carriages through the transitional spaces of the grand boulevards flanking the Louvre and Seine.

The painting was purchased from the artist by pianist Charles Wilfried de Beriot around 1873; in a later letter, in which Beriot asked Monet for an updated value for the work, the musician noted that he felt that Monet had a soft spot (un faible) for it, as Monet had valued it at double all his other paintings (1000 francs), at the time of Beriot's purchase.