The Met through my eyes. Monet.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse. Claude Monet. 1867.

Remembering nothing is accidental in a masterpiece, I took some time studying why Monet places us, the viewers, so far above this gathering. The vanishing point is high up on the left of the canvas, nearly off the painting.

In placing us there, he divides the canvas up into three even planes: land, sea, and air. Take the fence off the water's edge and measure for yourself. And where else do you see three even fields in the painting? It is a very French work indeed, and almost patriotic in its geometry.

It is also rather two-dimensional with plane sitting on plane, in a nod to the Japanese wood-block prints with which Monet had been recently enthralled.

Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family in Sainte-Adresse, a channel resort near Le Havre where my grandmother would be met by my grandparents some 90 years later. I love the painting for that bit of trivia. I also love the fact that clearly Monet was at odds with his father that season, placing him in the foreground but with his back to us. His cousins fare no better, featureless as they are.

But they are not the stars here. It is the light. And perhaps the light hitting that one parasol, not accidentally dead center and also in the fore, the blazing yellow-white cut off crisply by a sharp shadow, perfectly, on a perfect summer's day. I look at that, at the sunlight hitting the silk brocade of the dresses, striking the men's collars and cuffs, the glint on a shoe, a Panama hat, and I feel the afternoon sun in my soul radiating from this canvas from which Monet seems to have sucked every bit of humidity. It is dry and warm and breezy. One can hear meteorologists brag about this kind of day in one's head today, as if they were responsible for it themselves, but it is the kind of day, one perfect day, accidental perhaps, but purposefully immortalized in Monet's hand a hundred and fifty years ago.

Much of the painting is filled with smooth unnoticeable brush strokes. But most of it is dappled with Monet's signature strikes and dabs, playful and perfectly placed. He was a master manipulator of the medium and boasted in letters home that crowds would gather to watch his virtuosity before the easel.

A painting of perfect sunlight from me to you in the midsts of a blustery brutal winter.