The Cradle – Camille with the Artist's Son Jean

The Cradle – Camille with the Artist's Son Jean is the first picture Claude Monet painted of his elder son, Jean, born in Paris on 8 August 1867. The baby lies in a white cradle hung with flowered chintz, watched over by a seated woman. The canvas, over a meter tall, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, part of the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

What you are looking at

The cradle dominates the picture. It is an oval wicker basket lined in white and skirted with a printed cotton patterned with red and pink flowers, scalloped at the hem and trimmed in red. From a ring at the top of the canvas a long canopy of the same flowered fabric falls in a diagonal sweep to the left, and its curve leads the eye down to the child. Jean lies swaddled in white, with a white bonnet tied with a blue bow, his round face pink and his eyes open. One hand rests on the edge of the cradle.

Toys are placed around him. A doll or jester's rattle on a stick, with a blue and white hat and a red tuft, leans over the cradle from the right, and in the foreground a yellow, star-shaped pinwheel on a green stick stands up against the white. At right, half in the picture, sits a young woman in a dark striped dress and a white cap, her face in profile and her eyes lowered to the baby. The museum's title identifies her as Camille Doncieux, Jean's mother and later Monet's wife; her plain cap and quiet pose have led some viewers to ask whether she might be a nurse. Behind them is a plain, gray-white wall, its surface brushed in long vertical strokes.

Where and when it was painted

Monet was 26 and almost penniless when Jean was born. His family disapproved of Camille, and he spent much of that summer at his aunt's house at Sainte-Adresse on the Normandy coast, where he painted Garden at Sainte-Adresse, while Camille was in Paris. He returned for the birth, and the painting was made in Paris in the months after. Monet painted Camille repeatedly in these years, from Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress) to the figures of Women in the Garden. For this period, see Monet's life in paintings.

How it was painted

The handling is broad and fresh. The white fabrics, which make up most of the picture, are painted in many tones of white, gray, blue and cream, laid on in quick, flat strokes. The flowered chintz is suggested rather than described, with dabs of red and green over the white. The baby's face is the most carefully modeled area, soft and smooth among the rough fabric. The palette is light and the background bare, with little concern for depth, and the composition, cut off at the edges, has the casual frankness of a snapshot. It is a domestic scene painted at the scale of a public one.

Jean in Monet's paintings

Jean appears again and again in his father's work: at lunch in The Lunch of 1868, on his hobby horse in Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse of 1872, in the garden of The Artist's House at Argenteuil of 1873, and beside his mother in Woman with a Parasol of 1875. The Cradle is the first of these, painted when the future of the family was most uncertain.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged to Georges de Bellio, Monet's doctor and an early collector of the Impressionists, and passed to his daughter's family, the Donop de Monchys. It was sold in 1907 and was later in German collections in Munich and Bremen before entering Paul Mellon's collection. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1983 (1983.1.25), where it hangs in the West Building. The museum also holds Woman with a Parasol. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.