#impressionism

From what I read, he did a whole series like this — women in white, blazing sun, water behind — and collectors couldn't get enough of them at the time.

Apparently he painted a whole string of these — a woman, a window, light coming through — enough of them that people talk about it as a series. It's named after the china rather than the person, which tells you something about where he was looking.

They say he was sick to death of painting rich people's portraits by then, and spent his holidays doing pictures like this instead — no commission, no sitter, just whatever patch of ground happened to be in front of him.

From what I've read, he spent his last summers teaching and painting around a fishing harbor in Massachusetts, and the pictures from those years got looser and looser — apparently people argued even then about whether some were done. He died not long after this one.

He only went to Venice once, apparently, and finished most of the paintings from that trip back home afterwards, working from memory.

Apparently he spent summer after summer painting people idling by the New England shore — same trees, same water, a different crowd each time. They say he made dozens of these and barely changed the recipe.

A ropewalk is just a very long straight lane — apparently the rope has to be stretched out full length before it can be twisted, so the workshop ends up being the length of the rope. He spent summers over in Holland for years, painting the same small trades again and again.

They say he was an anarchist, and that painting people who worked with their hands was part of the politics — not just a pretty subject but a point being made.

She was apparently one of the most famous stage actresses in Europe, and sat for this just weeks before the First World War broke out. They say his arthritis was so bad by then that he worked with the brush wedged into his bandaged hand.

Apparently he painted the same pond in his own garden something like two hundred times. By this point his eyesight was going — cataracts — and people still argue about how much that's doing to the colours.

They say he worked on a whole stack of canvases at once from a hospital terrace across the river, swapping to a fresh one every time the light shifted, then spent years finishing the lot back home in France. The fog wasn't getting in the way of what he came for — from what I've read it was the reason he came.