Treasure Hunt #3

Pen Strokes

Article

May 2026

In Treasure Hunt, we share treasures we have found in, around and far beyond the editorial office – from ingenious objects and beautiful invitations to lines of poetry or something lovely from nature. Today’s find the early caricatures of Claude Monet.

Fig 1. Claude Monet, Karikatuur van een man met een grote sigaar, ca. 1855-1856.

Barbera Bosma (acting managing editor): ‘Every now and then, usually when I refuse to settle for the top search results and dig a little deeper, I come across extraordinary places online. One of them is the cabinet of curiosities known as The Public Domain Review, where I found early work by Claude Monet that was, at least to me, entirely unknown. No water lilies or misty cathedrals, but witty, and at times even vicious, caricatures.

Monet was already making serious money from them at the age of fifteen – charging twenty francs per drawing (roughly €200 in today’s money) and producing as many as seven or eight a day. These satirical portraits of local dignitaries and celebrities were sold through a framing shop in his home town of Le Havre. Whenever a new drawing was placed in the window, crowds would gather outside. “If I had carried on, I would have become a millionaire,” Monet said decades later in an interview with Le Temps.’

Fig 2. Claude Monet, Karikatuur van Jules Didier, ca. 1858

In the earliest portraits, the sitters remained anonymous; later, they were identified by name, such as Léon Manchon, treasurer of Le Havre’s Société des Amis des Arts. The most extraordinary image may be the one of Jules Didier, winner of the Prix de Rome, whom Monet depicted as a human head with a butterfly’s body on a dog leash.

The proceeds from these early caricatures allowed Monet, against his father’s wishes, to leave for Paris and become an artist. His friend and mentor Eugène Boudin, who considered the caricatures unworthy of Monet’s talent, encouraged him to paint landscapes instead. And the rest is, as they say, history.’

The year 2026 marks the centenary of Claude Monet’s death (1840-1926), with exhibitions at MuMa in Le Havre (15 June till 27 September 2026) and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (from 30 September 2026).

Source: publicdomainreview.org/collection/claude-monet-caricatures