Musée Marmottan Monet audio guide,
five stops, free.

Start with the red. A velvet dress, a green sofa trimmed with gold, heavy green curtains pulled back on a landscape, and four children arranged around their mother like a family on parade. The canvas is more than two and a quarter metres high and nearly three wide, and it was painted to be seen at the Salon of 1810, with Napoleon's Empire at its height.

The woman is the wife of Henri Clarke, Duke of Feltre, Napoleon's Minister of War. The painter, François-Xavier Fabre, was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David who had spent the Revolution in Florence, and he probably met Clarke in Tuscany, where Clarke was the French ambassador. At that same Salon, Fabre showed a full-length portrait of the duke himself, an official commission, and a portrait of the eldest son that he had painted in Florence in 1802. Father, heir and this family group went on the walls together.

Now read the children from the left. Edgar, born in 1799. Arthur, born in 1802. The little girl standing on the sofa, held by her mother, is Elphride, the only daughter, born in 1808. And the boy on the right is Alphonse, born in 1806. Every child except the girl is in fancy dress. The two older boys are got up as troubadours, with a feathered cap in the style of Henri the Fourth, slashed and laced doublets and turned-down musketeer boots. Alphonse wears an oriental costume, and he is holding up a mask with a big moustache to frighten his sister. Look at her face. That is the only joke in the whole picture.

The rest is dead serious, and that is the point. The museum reads portraits like this one as advertisements for Napoleon's new nobility: large families, plenty of sons, ready to inherit titles that had only just been invented. Clarke's own title came in 1809, after he helped defeat a British landing at Walcheren, in the Netherlands. Five years later he was one of the generals pressing Napoleon to abdicate, and King Louis the Eighteenth made him a peer of France.

The man who brought the painting into this house was Paul Marmottan, a historian of the Consulate and the Empire, who redecorated his home in Empire style and bought this portrait to furnish one of his salons. In 1886 he wrote that the painters of his own day no longer drew, they sketched, and no longer painted, they brushed. He meant the Impressionists. Their most famous picture now hangs under his garden.

Your eye goes up this painting the way the girl goes up the ladder. The canvas is tall and narrow, more than a metre and a half high and only eighty-four centimetres wide, and everything in it climbs: the blue ladder, the pink dress, the arm reaching into the leaves, and at the very top, the cherries.

The museum calls this Berthe Morisot's most ambitious composition, and it took her two years. She began it in 1891 in the country, at Mézy, in a house the family called la Maison Blotière, with her daughter Julie posing at cherry-picking time. Julie is the girl on the ladder. Below her, in the straw hat, holding up the basket, is Julie's cousin, Jeannie Gobillard.

Morisot worked from life first, a small painted sketch and several drawings, and then carried the composition back to Paris to finish it. There she had a problem. Julie was a teenager and rarely available, so her mother replaced her with a professional model named Jeanne Fourmanoir. Look at the girl on the ladder with that in mind: the pose and the pink dress started as a portrait of a daughter and were finished on a stranger.

She painted two large versions of this scene, and the one in front of you is considered the more accomplished. Renoir advised her to show it at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars, and for a while she thought about it. In the end it was not seen in public until 1896, at a retrospective at the dealer Durand-Ruel's. Morisot had died the year before, in 1895, of pneumonia. Julie was sixteen, and since her father had died three years earlier, she was left an orphan.

The two cousins in this painting married on the same day. In May 1900, Julie married the painter Ernest Rouart and Jeannie married the poet Paul Valéry, in a double wedding in Passy. Their families went on living in this part of Paris, in the sixteenth arrondissement, and when the museum opened in 1934 they came to the inauguration as neighbours. It was the Rouart descendants who finally brought Morisot's paintings here, in a bequest of 1993.

So the girl holding the basket and the girl on the ladder ended up living in the same arrondissement as the house where their picture now hangs. Look at the top of the canvas once more, where the red of the fruit is dotted through the green in quick single touches, the last thing your eye reaches on the way up.

It is smaller than people expect. Fifty centimetres by sixty-five, a blue-grey haze with one hot orange disc in it, and a streak of orange on the water underneath. A whole movement in painting was named after this canvas.

It is a view of Le Havre, the port town where Monet grew up. Around November 1872 he was staying at the Hôtel Amirauté, and from the window of his room he looked south-east over the outer harbour in the early morning. You can find the structure if you look for it. The Quai au Bois on the left, the Quai Courbe on the right, where building work was going on, and in the middle, the opening of the tide lock that let the transatlantic ships through to the Bassin de l'Eure. Cranes, smokestacks and masts stand in the autumn mist. Then look at the foreground, at the ferrymen's rowing boats, and at the sun and its reflection. The museum says those were added last, when Monet was finishing, and that the whole picture was painted in a few hours.

The morning has since been pinned down. In 2014 an astronomer, Donald Olson, and his colleagues used the position of the sun, the tide tables for the harbour, old weather records and the direction of the smoke in the painting to date it to the thirteenth of November 1872, at about twenty-five to eight in the morning.

The name came in 1874. Monet and his friends, shut out of the official Salon, organised their own exhibition in the photographer Nadar's former studio, and Monet sent this picture. When he was asked for a title for the catalogue, he decided it could not decently pass for a view of Le Havre, so he called it Impression. A conservative critic, Louis Leroy, went to review the show for the satirical paper Le Charivari and saw his chance. His article of the twenty-fifth of April 1874 was called The Exhibition of the Impressionists, and it was meant as an insult. A few days later a friendlier critic, Jules Castagnary, used the word as praise, and it stuck to the whole group.

The irony of where you are standing is hard to beat. This museum belongs to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the institution that had shut these painters out of the Salon, and it was founded on the collection of Paul Marmottan, who had written against them. Then in 1940 Victorine Donop de Monchy, whose father, Doctor Georges de Bellio, had been one of Monet's first supporters, gave the museum this painting and ten other Impressionist canvases. From that day the Académie owned the picture that gave its old enemies their name.

It has not always been here. On the twenty-seventh of October 1985, in broad daylight, five masked gunmen walked into the museum and took nine paintings, this one among them. They were found five years later, in December 1990, in a small villa in Corsica, and the painting went back on the wall in 1991. More recently it has travelled on purpose: to the Musée d'Orsay for the spring of 2024, then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington until January 2025.

Before you leave it, go close to the lower left corner. The signature reads Claude Monet, and the date beside it, seventy-two, was added later. For the painting that Impressionism dates itself from, its own date went on as an afterthought.