Detail of Jean Monet on his Hobbyhorse by Monet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2008

Artist: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)

Title: Jean Monet (1867–1913) on His Hobby Horse

Date: 1872

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 23 7/8 x 29 1/4 in. (60.6 x 74.3 cm)

Credit Line: Gift of Sara Lee Corporation, 2000

Accession Number: 2000.195

Gallery Label

When Monet painted this picture of his elder son, Jean, in the summer of 1872, the artist and his family had recently returned to France from their self-imposed exile during the Franco-Prussian War. Through the efforts of the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, the artist's finances had begun to improve. The once-impoverished Monets were thus able to rent a house in Argenteuil, an agreeable suburb northwest of Paris. For this portrait, Monet posed the five-year-old in the garden of their new home.

The picture is freely and thinly painted, with areas of bare canvas showing here and there. Monet never exhibited it but kept it throughout his life.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/europe...