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Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. His mother was thirty-five years old and already the childless widow of a first husband at the time of Monet's birth. Her second husband, Monet's father, was then forty, and her only other child, Monet's only full sibling, a brother, was four. By the time Monet was five, he and his family had moved to the port town of Le Havre, where his father was in the business of provisioning France's commercial shipping fleet. It was there, in this town where the Seine River spills into the English Channel, that Monet's mother is said to have encouraged her son's early interest in art; and it was there that she died in 1857 when he was not yet seventeen years old but already within a year of establishing himself as a draftsman of some notoriety on the strength of caricatures of local personalities exhibited in the window of a framer's shop.1
By 1860 Monet had taken up painting, and in that year he found himself at the age of twenty with a new half-sister born to his sixty-year-old widowed father and his father's twenty-four-year-old mistress, a sibling who until 1974 was entirely unmentioned in the literature on the artist. Perhaps represented at her father's side staring out to sea in a painting of 1867, Monet's half-sister was legitimated in 1870 byway of his father's second marriage, a marriage that took place a mere three months before Monet's father's death and only four months after Monet's own first marriage had similarly legitimated his three-year-old son.
When Monet's father died in 1871 his son was in London, in flight from military service in the Franco-Prussian war, the