Monet tries to retrieve “Garden at Sainte-Adresse”
Paris 10 April 1913, 13,2x20,6cm, 2 pages on a folded leaf.
Autograph letter signed, two pages written in purple ink on a folded leaf. Small marginal tears at the folds.Exceptional unpublished autograph letter signed by Claude Monet. The painter tries to buy back his painting, “Garden at Sainte-Adresse” (1867), a masterpiece exhibited in 1879 at the 4th Impressionist exhibition, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Directly confronted with the soaring prices of his own paintings, Monet informs an unknown recipient that his work of art had finally been sold to famous art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.
The letter is mentioned in the MET's bibliography: “Claude Monet. Letter. April 10, 1913, probably refers to this picture in stating that he would have liked to buy it back in an exchange with Madame Frat but that the price of 30,000 francs was too high and that Monsieur Frat's original offer to him had been only 20,000 francs”
More than forty years after the creation of this painting, Monet wished to buy back
Garden at Sainte-Adresse from his first owner Victor Frat, friend of painter Frédéric Bazille, who acquired it for only 400 francs in the 1870s. According to Monet's letter, Frat had agreed to sell it back to him: “The gracious offer that [he] had been made was only 20,000 [francs]”. This is the only source revealing the first offer's price. Victor Frat died in 1902 and his widow proved less generous, asking for 30 000 francs. Monet could not compete with Durand-Ruel who eventually bought it for 27,000 francs: “I can only inform you, with great regret, that having been informed by Mr. Durand Ruel that the sale of the painting in question seemed to me to be ratified, there was nothing left for me to do but to submit” Less than a month after its purchase, Durand-Ruel had already shipped the painting to the United States and exhibited it the following year. In 1926, it sold for $11,500 to Reverend Theodore Pitcairn and joined the MET's collections in 1967.
As the price of his painting climbed to new highs, Monet provides here precious information on one of the most famous Impressionnist views of Normandy which became emblematic of the Japanese influences in his work.
Garden at Sainte-Adresse also had sentimental value, painted at a time of family turmoil. He included his father Adolphe in the composition, the wife of Adolphe-Aimé Lecadre, one of three nephews of Monet's aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, as well as her daughter Sophie at the edge of the water. Monet's intentions behind this purchase remain obscure: did he want to sell the painting back to the recipient of this letter, did he plan to donate it to the French state, which he later did with the famous Water Lilies, or did he wish to keep one of his favorite paintings to himself?
The letter also underlines the importance of art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, a key figure in Impressionism who risked everything to promote the movement in its early days. After establishing the market for Impressionism in the United States as well as in Europe, he now had immense purchasing power to acquire Monet's paintings without his permission: “there was nothing left for me to do but to submit”, Monet complains in the letter. Within a few decades, Durand-Ruel bought more than 1,000 of the artist's paintings, which sparked immense interest among U.S. art collectors, as was the case with
Garden at Sainte-Adresse.
This letter marks an important milestone in the journey of Monet's masterpiece “Garden at Sainte-Adresse”, which at that very moment escaped its author and left France forever. These few lines provide unpublished information on Monet's desperate attempt to reclaim a work that was of fundamental importance to him.
