Woman with a Parasol, Madame Monet and Her Son
Claude Monet (1840-1926) · 1875
A woman stands on a grassy rise against a bright, windy sky, her white dress and veil blown sideways, a green parasol shading her face. Below her a small boy in a straw hat looks up from the grass. They are Monet's wife Camille and their seven-year-old son Jean, painted on a summer walk near their home at Argenteuil, on the Seine outside Paris. You see them from below, as if you had stopped on the path and looked up just as a gust caught her skirt. The whole canvas seems to move.
Monet painted this quickly, probably in a single outdoor session, and the brushwork shows it. The clouds are dragged across the sky in broad strokes, the grass and wildflowers are flicks of green, yellow and pink, and the dress is not white at all but a mix of blue, yellow and lavender reflections. Look at Camille's face, which is half lost in the shadow of the parasol, so that her features barely register, and at the strip of green light bounced from the parasol onto her veil. The figures are treated exactly like the landscape, as patches of colour in bright air, which is the essence of what the Impressionists were trying to do.
The painting was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Camille died only four years later, at thirty-two, and the picture is often seen as one of the most tender records of her. It stayed in Monet's possession for a while and then passed through private hands to the collector Paul Mellon, son of the Gallery's founder, who gave it to the National Gallery in 1983. Notice the small signature and date at the lower right, and the way the grass around the boy's feet is scumbled so loosely that the canvas weave shows through.
Did You Know? Monet later painted two more versions of the same motif at Giverny in 1886, using his stepdaughter as the model with her face deliberately left blank.
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