Voyeur in the studio

We are in the atelier of Claude Monet in Giverny around 1920. A battered sofa and a table crowded with objects stand against a backdrop of two immense canvases depicting the artist’s beloved water lilies. The Impressionist painter, with palette in hand, is choosing a brush. The scene was shot by Henri Manuel, an official photographer for the French government.
Painterly tradition has already given us images in which artists, from Jacques-Louis David to Gustave Courbet, picture themselves