Michel Monet with a Pompon

Monet painted this tender portrait of his son Michel in 1880 during one of the most personally devastating years of his life. Camille had died at Vétheuil in September 1879, and Monet was left with two young sons — Jean, then twelve, and Michel, only a year old — in a combined household with Alice Hoschedé and her six children. The portrait of the infant Michel, likely painted in the same spring or summer of 1880 that produced the catastrophic ice-floe paintings of the frozen Seine, represents a private emotional counterweight to the intense outdoor painting campaigns Monet used to manage grief. Family portraits were a minor thread in his output throughout his career — he rarely exhibited them and did not pursue portraiture commercially — but images of Camille, Jean, and Michel from the Argenteuil and Vétheuil years have a psychological intimacy absent from his landscape work. The Musée Marmottan Monet, which holds the largest collection of Monet's works anywhere, received most of its holdings through a bequest from Michel himself, who outlived his father by over thirty years.

Monet applies paint with soft, dabbed strokes typical of his handling of figures in domestic settings. The child's face is rendered with delicate transitions of warm flesh tones, while the pompon accessory receives a lively impasto touch. Background is kept deliberately loose to keep attention on the sitter.