#water

He only went to Venice the once, fairly late on, and apparently didn't finish much of it there — the canvases came home with him and got worked over in the studio for years after. There's more than one version of this same view.

Wikipedia has this down as the earliest painting of his that anyone knows about, done when he was seventeen, out by a stream near Le Havre. It's signed with the name Oscar — apparently that was the first half of his actual name, and he dropped it in his twenties.

This one sat around unfinished for decades — started in Italy, finished in Paris when he was in his seventies and running the state art school, according to Wikipedia. Two of his students painted the background and the water jar for him, which sounds like cheating until you learn that's just how a big studio worked.

It's an old Greek story — a young man goes to fetch water and the nymphs pull him in, never to be seen again. In 2018 the gallery took this off the wall for a week, on purpose, to start a conversation about how women get shown in old paintings, and left the space open for visitors' notes. The notes mostly said put it back, they say. Back it went.

This came just after a long public row in Vienna over some ceiling paintings he'd been commissioned to make for the university — they got called ugly and obscene in the papers, and he ended up handing the money back. Supposedly he wanted to title this one 'To My Critics', and the woman grinning out over her shoulder was the reply. He was talked out of the title.

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.