It’s hard to believe that there’s anything left to discover
about Claude Monet. Among those much loved, much studied,
and much exhibited perennial box-office favorites, the
Impressionists, he may be the most loved, most studied, and
most exhibited. Not only is he well represented, often in
some depth, in the permanent collection of just about any
major museum, but, in the last two decades or so, there have
also been dozens of special exhibitions in the United
States, Europe, and occasionally in Asia wholly about Monet
or at least featuring him: surveys of his evolution,
studies of his late work and his series, examinations of his
early efforts and his still lifes, explorations of his
paintings of Italy and of London, investigations of his
relationship to his colleagues, and more. This spring alone,
four exhibitions were devoted to Monet internationally. One
of them, on view at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,
Massachusetts, through September 16, and seen earlier at the
Royal Academy of Arts, London, is improbably titled “The
Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings.”[1]
Unknown? What else is there to be
learned?

The answer turns out to be “quite a lot.” Monet was
long-lived—born in 1840, he died in 1926—and immensely
prolific during his long career, producing, according to the
catalogue raisonné of his works, more than two thousand
paintings. The celebrated dealer in Old Masters, Joseph
Duveen, is supposed to have been contemptuous of
Impressionist works because there were so many of them. But
it’s the