Before the water lilies, Monet drew cartoons of well-known locals

Claude Monet's first paying work was caricature. At fifteen, he sold unflattering drawings of well-known men around Le Havre through a framing shop, and crowds gathered at the window to look at them. By his own later account, he was among the most successful artists in the Norman port city.

He charged 20 francs a drawing, roughly 200 euros today, and made as many as seven or eight a day. Almost fifty years later, he told an interviewer at Le Temps that if he had continued, "I would have been a millionaire." A group of the drawings is now in the Art Institute of Chicago, mostly a gift from Carter Harrison IV, a former mayor of that city.

The earliest sitters are anonymous now, with titles like The Man in the Small Hat and The Man with the Big Cigar. His 1858 caricature of Jules Didier, who had just won the Prix de Rome, draws him as a "Butterfly Man" on a leash, with a dog that walks him. Monet scholars still disagree about what the imagery means. Another shows Henri Cassinelli, a rival applicant for an 1858 art subsidy, with the caption "Rufus Croutinelli," a pun on croute, a daub of paint. Monet did not get the subsidy either.

The roughly 2,000 francs that the caricatures earned him paid for his move to Paris, against his father's wishes. At that same window, while he watched people admire his own drawings, he first noticed the paintings beside them, by Eugène Boudin. Boudin later took him outdoors to paint for the first time.

Previously:
• Painterly panels in Monet graphic novel
• Rembrandt copy was copied by the master himself