Madame Monet and a Friend in the Garden

Madame Monet and a Friend in the Garden, also catalogued as Two Women in a Garden, is a small painting by Claude Monet of about 1872, showing two women resting on the grass in the flickering shade of a flowering bush. The canvas, about 51 by 66 centimeters and signed at lower right, is in a private collection: in 2015 Wendy and Leonard Goldberg pledged it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a future gift. The woman in pink is usually identified as Camille Monet, the painter's wife.

What does the painting show?

Two women sit close together on the ground under a canopy of leaves, and the picture is cropped tightly around them, with no horizon, no house and almost no sky. The woman on the left, in a pale pink dress and a wide pink hat heaped with trimming, bends her head over an open book in her lap; her face is shadowed under the brim, eyes lowered. The woman on the right, dark-haired and bareheaded, wears a loose lilac-blue dress with a white ruff at the neck. She reclines on one elbow, her skirt stretched out toward the right edge, and looks out past the viewer with a calm, heavy-lidded gaze.

The real event is the light. Sun breaks through the leaves overhead and falls across everything in irregular spots: dabs of white and cream on the pink skirt, pale lavender-white flecks on the blue dress, bright touches on the hat and the open pages. Above, the foliage is a dark weave of olive, brown and green, picked out with pinkish blossoms. At upper right the shade opens onto a patch of sunlit lawn in a clear yellow-green, crossed by the long blue-green shadows of the bush.

Around the women the ground is warm brown and green, scattered with fallen petals and the same spots of light. Monet's signature, "Claude Monet," is brushed in dark paint at lower right.

How was it painted?

The problem Monet set himself is one of the central problems of early Impressionism: how to paint figures in broken outdoor light without losing them. His answer here is to paint the dresses first as broad, fairly flat areas of pink and blue, modeled with cooler shadows, and then to lay the sunlight on top as thick, separate touches of light color. The spots do not follow the folds of the cloth; they sit on the surface like a pattern, which is exactly how dappled light looks to the eye.

The faces are kept small and simple, a few strokes each, and the reading woman's features almost vanish under her hat. The background foliage is painted with short, quick strokes in every direction, the paint dragged so that darker layers show through. The contrast between the shaded figures and the bright lawn at upper right gives the picture its depth, since there is no perspective to do it.

Where and when was it painted?

The canvas dates from around 1872, Monet's first full year at Argenteuil, on the Seine northwest of Paris, where the family rented a house with a garden. That spring and summer he painted Camille out of doors again and again, reading, sewing or resting in the shade. Two closely related canvases show figures resting under a flowering lilac: Lilacs in the Sun in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and Lilacs, Gray Weather in the Musée d'Orsay. In Springtime, now in the Walters Art Museum, Camille reads alone under the same kind of leafy canopy, flecked with the same light.

Who the second woman is has not been established. Writers on Monet's 1872 garden pictures often suggest that Camille's companion in them was Eugénie Lescouezec, the partner of the painter Alfred Sisley, but the identification is not secure for this canvas. Camille herself, Monet's favorite model since Camille (Woman in Green Dress) of 1866, appears throughout these years, as in Camille Monet on a Garden Bench.

Is it the same as Lilacs in the Sun?

No. Lilacs in the Sun and Lilacs, Gray Weather are larger, wider views in which the women are small figures seated deep inside the shade of a lilac bush, with the garden around them. This picture moves in close, so that the two women and their dresses fill almost the whole canvas and the dappled light becomes the subject. It is closest in spirit to Springtime, which shares its tight framing and its play of sunspots on a pale dress.

Where is Madame Monet and a Friend in the Garden today?

The painting remains in a private collection. LACMA listed it in 2015, under the title Two Women in a Garden, as a future gift of Wendy and Leonard Goldberg made for the museum's fiftieth anniversary. Whether the transfer has been completed should be checked with the museum. For public collections with Monet's work, see where to see Monet's paintings and the life of Claude Monet.