PUBLIC FAVORITES (30)

THE Currier Gallery of Art, in Manchester, N.H., is a proud little sister to the nation's great metropolitan museums. Since it cannot approach them in size, it tries to rival them in quality. The public favorite at the gallery is a masterpiece of the airiest sort: Claude Monet's dappled evocation of a vacation on the Seine (opposite).

Monet probably painted the picture in 1869, when he was a young man and a failure, living in abject poverty and painting in perfect joy. Renoir used to drop in at Bougival with a loaf of bread to keep Monet going. Five years later, Monet and his friends--Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, among others--staged a group show of their work that the French public greeted with howls of scorn. One critic had dubbed the bunch Impressionists after the title of a Monet painting: Impression--Rising Sun.

A newspaper reported that "yesterday a poor soul was arrested in the Rue Le Peletier who, after having seen the exhibition was biting the passers-by."

Today it is almost impossible to see why these pictures should have enraged anyone. The Monet at the Currier Gallery is a placid, solid landscape, riffled by a hurrying breeze. True its chief tone is not the staid brown beloved by the academicians at the time, but it is a hardly less respectable grey. Wet grey holds white sunlight and brown, peach and lavender earth together. It is the kind of picture that inspires conservative amateurs, such as Winston Churchill, to their happy daubings.

At 40, Monet began to go from his lovely and unprofitable beginnings to a fanatical and highly lucrative exploration of impressionism's end: the picturing of daylight, like a spangled web swathed about the world. With worldly success he lost the almost Flemish reticence that gives The Seine at Bougival halt its charm. Long before his death in 1926, the old man's gilded haystacks and mauve cathedrals became dated. But among the rich and often raw liqueurs of modern painting, his best work is still as refreshing as a long glass of sodawater, iced.

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