At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre. Crowds would gather in the Norman port city to gawk at the pictures he sold through a framing shop: not paintings of haystacks or of the sea or water lilies, but slightly cruel caricatures of local bigwigs and minor celebrities. He had already learned to commercialize, charging his customers 20 francs (around 200€ in today’s money). “If I had continued”, he claimed to an interviewer in Le Temps almost fifty years later, “I would have been a millionaire.”

Spurred by profits, the young Monet was productive, creating up to seven or eight of these caricatures a day; a small collection of them is now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, most donated by the former mayor Carter Harrison IV (1860–1953). The French art historian Rodolphe Walter has claimed that his caricatures constituted a “clandestine apprenticeship”, the first attempts by a son of Le Havre’s bourgeois shipbuilders to make his way in the art world.

The earliest are anonymous: the identities of The Man in the Small Hat or The Man with the Big Cigar are now lost, although the framing shop devotees may well have been able to name them. Some of the works are imitations, like the 1859 drawing of the French journalist August Vacquerie (1819–1895) that Monet seems to have copied from Nadar (1820–1910), probably the period’s most famous caricaturist.

Monet’s own 1858 caricature of Léon Manchon, the treasurer of Le Havre’s Société des amis des arts, captures his subject’s appearance but also, in the background, both his love of the arts and his work as a notary. Most fantastical is the 1858 caricature of Jules Didier (1831–1914), which shows the 1857 winner of the Prix de Rome as a “Butterfly Man” being led on a leash by a dog. Monet scholars remain divided as to the symbolic meaning of the iconography, though more obviously derisive is the drawing of a dejected fellow applicant to an 1858 Le Havre art subsidy, Henri Cassinelli. Monet has captioned it “Rufus Croutinelli”: a slightly forced pun on “croute”, meaning a daub of paint. Monet didn’t receive the subsidy either.

Sixty-year-old Monet’s claims about how he could have made his young fortune probably had more to do with his later difficulties in selling Impressionism than the actual fortunes to be made in portraits-charge, but it was the roughly 2,000 francs (20,000€) from selling these caricatures that allowed him to, against his father’s wishes, move to Paris and begin training as an artist. (He also received a pension from his wealthy aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, with whom he had been living since his mother’s death in 1857.)

Perhaps it helped him in other ways as well. In the Le Temps interview, Monet claimed that it was while admiring his admirers at the framing shop window that he first encountered the work of his mentor Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), whose paintings were also hung there. Boudin would later take him en plein air for the first time. Perhaps, too, there’s something in the quickness of the caricature that speaks to what Impressionism would become — a desire to capture not just the literal appearance of a thing, but its true essence.