At left, in dark slacks, a bowler hat, and a periwinkle shirt that rhymes visually with his son’s outfit, the bearded Monet tends to these same flowers, a watering can by his side.

The reds in these accoutrements and the rooster’s comb echo the red flowers (identified by Tucker as geraniums) that border the garden. ) She sits on the grass in a white dress holding a red fan with her right hand so it peeks up above the dress. (On the appearance of this distinctive hat in four other Manet paintings of the period, see the entry on Manet’s Boating. Camille looks out to the viewer with her dark eyes shaded by the tulle brim of her white hat and her left fist supporting her chin. 1 above) and with the hat alone in The Artist's House at Argenteuil (1873, Art Institute of Chicago) and The Luncheon: Decorative Panel (ca. Monet, himself, painted his son Jean in this same sailor suit and red-rimmed straw hat the year before in his Poppy Field (see fig. Jean leans lazily against his mother in a periwinkle sailor suit with sporty red shoes and a straw hat, also with a red rim. The Met’s picture presents Monet, his first wife, Camille, and their six- or seven-year-old son in a moment of leisure. The painting was executed in Monet’s garden at Maison Aubry, the house in Argenteuil (at 2, rue Pierre Guienne) that he initially rented in 1871, most likely with the help of Manet who was then living nearby at his family home in Gennevilliers, just across the Seine. Having gingerly approached sunlit scenes viewed from indoors in the early 1870s (such as Interior at Arcachon ), by the mid-1870s Manet fully adopted both Impressionist subjects and plein-air (outdoor) painting, of which The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil is a prime example. He now embraced their images of leisure painted outdoors in a lighter palette, after his many darker-toned Spanish-influenced paintings of the 1860s and the poor reception of his Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass (both 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). He remained reluctant to exhibit with the Impressionists, and sought the approval of the Salon all his life.The Painting: In the summer of 1874, Edouard Manet was living and working in the suburbs of Paris alongside his younger Impressionist friends. In the 1870s, under the influence of Monet and Renoir, he produced landscapes and street scenes directly inspired by Impressionism. Manet's work became famous at the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of paintings rejected by the official Salon. In Paris he associated with avant-garde writers, notably Baudelaire, who appears in 'The Music in the Tuileries Gardens'. The work of the Spaniard Velázquez directly influenced his adoption of this style. His work was founded on the opposition of light and shadow, a restricted palette in which black was very important, and on painting directly from the model. Manet was a native Parisian and the son of wealthy parents. His unconventional subject matter drawn from modern life, and his concern for the artist's freedom in handling paint made him an important precursor of Impressionism. Manet was the elder statesman of the Impressionists, although he never participated in their exhibitions but continued to compete in the Salons.

Edouard monet