Garden at Sainte-Adresse

On a sunny seaside terrace at Sainte-Adresse, Monet's father and relatives sit among beds of blazing gladioli and nasturtiums, two flags snapping in the breeze, the horizon crowded with sailboats and steamers. The young Monet keys the whole scene to brilliant, sunlit color and tips the space steeply upward in flat bands, borrowing from the Japanese prints he admired. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, the Garden at Sainte-Adresse is a dazzling early work - bourgeois leisure by the sea rendered in pure light and pattern, an important step toward the Impressionism to come.