Meditation (Madame Monet on the Sofa)

Meditation, Madame Monet on the Sofa is a small, quiet interior that Claude Monet painted around 1871, most likely in London, where he had taken refuge with his wife Camille and their young son Jean during the Franco-Prussian War. The canvas, 48 by 75 centimeters and number 163 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

What you are looking at

Camille sits at the left end of a long chaise sofa upholstered in a pale chintz printed with red and pink flowers, leaning back into a cushioned arm. She wears a dark, almost black dress with a white collar and a touch of red at the throat. Her head is bowed and turned toward the window at the right, her eyes lowered, lost in thought. A small red book lies closed in her lap, her fingers resting on it.

The room is dim. Behind her, at upper left, a mantelpiece carries a vase and a piece of patterned porcelain, and the bottom edge of a gilt frame hangs on the wall above the sofa. At the right a tall window is screened by a gauzy white curtain and a heavy dark drape, and daylight seeps through the gauze, catching the far end of the sofa, its turned wooden leg and the patterned carpet. The figure is placed at the left with the long, empty sofa stretching away beside her, which gives the picture its feeling of stillness and waiting.

How it was painted

The handling is closer to Édouard Manet or James McNeill Whistler than to Monet's later broken touch. The dark dress is painted as one broad, simple mass, its folds marked by a few strokes of dark blue-gray; the face is modeled in a handful of warm tones. The flowered upholstery is done in loose, quick strokes that suggest the pattern without counting it. The real subject is the soft, gray light falling across a room, and the way it picks out the red of the book, the white of the collar and the pale stripe of curtain.

Notice the balance of the composition: the dark mass of the figure on the left, the bright vertical of the curtain on the right, and between them the long, light horizontal of the sofa. It is the arrangement of a Japanese print, or of a Whistler, more than of a conventional portrait.

The title, Meditation, is apt but modest. Nothing happens in the picture, and nothing is explained. We do not know what Camille has been reading or what she is thinking about, only that she has stopped. For a painter who usually showed her walking in fields with a parasol, this is a striking image of a young wife in a foreign city, in a rented room, far from home in wartime.

London, 1870–71

When war broke out in July 1870, Monet, who had married Camille Doncieux that June, left France to avoid conscription and crossed to London. There he met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become his most important supporter, and painted views of the river such as The Thames below Westminster and of Hyde Park and Green Park. In the summer of 1871 the family moved on to Zaandam in Holland, then back to France. Our hub on Monet in London follows both of his London periods.

Intimate scenes like this one are rare in his work. Camille appears in many Monet pictures, from the formal Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress) to Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, but seldom so private and inward. The closest comparison is the lamplit Interior after Dinner of 1868–69. Thirty years later Monet would return to London to paint the Houses of Parliament in fog.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, which also holds his Camille Monet on Her Deathbed of 1879, the last time he painted her. It suits readers drawn to dark academia images of solitary reading. More on Claude Monet.