Camille Monet on a Garden Bench

What you are looking at

A woman sits sideways on a green-slatted garden bench, her full grey-green skirt spread across the seat and onto the path. She wears a black jacket over it and a dark hat trimmed with red and pink flowers. Her face is turned toward us, pale and unsmiling, her eyes heavy. In her right hand, in a white glove, she holds a small slip of paper, a note or letter.

Behind the bench a bearded man in a black top hat and dark coat leans his arms on the backrest and looks at her. On the seat beside her lies a bouquet of pink and red flowers. Beyond them, a bright bed of red and orange geraniums blazes in the sun, and in the far left distance a woman in lavender walks with a green parasol.

The woman is Camille Doncieux, Monet's wife since 1870 and his most frequent model. The garden is the one behind the house the Monets rented in Argenteuil, on the Seine near Paris.

An enigmatic scene

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the painting, describes it as enigmatic. Most of Monet's garden pictures of these years show family leisure: Camille and their son Jean among flowers, guests at lunch. Here the mood is different.

Camille looks sad, almost wary, and the man behind her is not her husband. The Met notes that the painting was made in the year Camille's father died, in September 1873, and suggests that the top-hatted gentleman, later identified as a neighbor, may have come to offer condolences and the bouquet. If so, the paper in her hand may be a letter of sympathy.

That is an interpretation, not a documented fact; Monet left no explanation. What is clear is that he set an emotionally ambiguous moment in the middle of a sunlit garden, and that the contrast is deliberate.

Close looking

Start with the light. The path in the foreground is a warm, pinkish sand color with violet shadows. The geraniums behind are painted with quick, thick dabs of vermilion and orange that almost vibrate against the green. All this brightness sits behind Camille, who is dressed in dark, subdued tones; she is the one shaded, quiet zone in a picture full of color.

Then look at the bench. Its green slats run in long diagonals across the canvas from left to right, leading the eye from the empty end of the bench to Camille, then to the man and the flowers. The bouquet is painted in a few loose strokes of pink, white and red, set off from Camille by a deliberate gap. Monet uses that space to separate the two people as much as to join them.

Finally, the distant woman with the parasol. She is tiny, a few strokes of lavender and green, but she repeats the motif of a woman in the garden and reminds us that this is a social space. Some viewers have identified her too as Camille, painted twice, a device Monet had used before in Women in the Garden.

Argenteuil and Impressionism

Monet lived in Argenteuil from late 1871 to 1878, and these were the years in which the Impressionist style crystallized. In 1873 he and his friends were planning the independent exhibition that would open in April 1874 and give the movement its name. His Argenteuil garden appears in many paintings of the period, including The Luncheon (Monet's Garden at Argenteuil) and Monet's Garden at Argenteuil. The garden was rented, not owned, and Monet filled it with flowers in pots and beds specifically to paint them.

Camille

Camille Doncieux (1847–1879) posed for Monet from 1865, most famously in Camille (Woman in the Green Dress) and Woman with a Parasol. She died in 1879 at Vétheuil, aged thirty-two, and Monet painted her on her deathbed (Camille Monet on Her Deathbed). Seen against that history, the melancholy of this picture can look prophetic, though it was painted six years earlier.

A painting of modern life

The Impressionists' friend, the writer Edmond Duranty, called in 1876 for a painting that would show people in their real settings, their gestures revealing their circumstances. Camille Monet on a Garden Bench answers that call in a small way. Nothing here is posed in the academic sense: the man leans casually, the flowers have been put down rather than arranged, Camille seems to have just turned to look at us. The painting's meaning comes from these small signs, the glove, the note, the top hat, the bouquet, which is why viewers still try to read it like a scene from a novel.

Provenance

The painting was part of the collection of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, which was promised to the Met and entered it in 2002 (accession 2002.62.1).

Where to see it

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among the nineteenth-century European paintings (listed in Gallery 821). Gallery assignments change, so check the Met's website before visiting.