Doing Impressions: Monet’s Early Caricatures (ca. late 1850s)

Early hustle in Le Havre

By his own account, Claude Monet was already a small-town celebrity at fifteen — not for haystacks, but for sharp little caricatures hawked through a framing shop in Le Havre. Crowds allegedly gathered to gawk and buy; Monet charged about 20 francs a piece (roughly €200 today) and, it has been reported that, later told an interviewer he “would have been a millionaire” if he’d stuck with the trade. Productive and brisk, he knocked out as many as seven or eight caricatures a day. A handful survive: several are now in the Art Institute of Chicago, many having come via former mayor Carter Harrison IV.

Targets, jokes and apprenticeships

The subjects ranged from anonymous local types — The Man in the Small Hat, The Man with the Big Cigar — to recognisable figures. Some works are obvious borrowings (an 1859 sketch of journalist August Vacquerie echoes Nadar), while others are pure invention: an 1858 Léon Manchon portrait doubles as a joke about his art devotion and notary work; Jules Didier appears as a “Butterfly Man” on a leash. Rodolphe Walter has called these pieces a “clandestine apprenticeship” for the son of a bourgeois shipbuilder. Monet scholars remain divided over the iconography; satire, it seems, could be both tender and savage.

Money, mentorship and the hint of Impressionism

Those caricature sales — about 2,000 francs in total (roughly €20,000) — bought Monet a ticket to Paris and a shot at formal training, despite his father’s disapproval. It has been reported that Monet also credited the framing shop with introducing him to Eugène Boudin, who would take him outdoors painting for the first time. Think of the caricature’s speed — the quick line, the captured gesture — and you can almost see a blueprint for Impressionism: not just likeness, but essence. A teenager throwing shade at local grandees ended up funding a revolution in how the world looks at light. Who would’ve guessed?

Sources: publicdomainreview.org, Hacker News