The Other Monet

Claude Monet (1840–1926) is one of France’s most famous and beloved painters, but until now almost nobody has heard of Monet’s older brother, Léon (1836–1917). Léon Monet was a Rouen-based color chemist, industrialist, and an early patron and collector of Impressionist paintings by his brother Claude, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro. Shortly before her death at age ninety-one in 2017, Françoise Cauvin, Léon Monet’s granddaughter, requested Claude’s 1874 portrait of her grandfather to be shown publicly. In the years since Madame Cauvin’s wish, curators have brought new attention to Léon Monet, notably in a 2020 exhibition at Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts about another early, Rouen-based collector of Impressionist art, François Depeaux. Now we have “Léon Monet: The Artist’s Brother and Collector” at the Musée du Luxembourg, organized by the nineteenth-century specialist Géraldine Lefebvre.