Springtime

Springtime is a small, quiet canvas Claude Monet painted in 1872, a few months after he moved his family to Argenteuil, on the Seine just outside Paris. A young woman in a pale pink and white dress sits in the grass reading, and sunlight comes through the leaves above her in loose coins of light. The sitter is usually identified as Camille Monet, the painter's wife, though the painting gives no name. It belongs to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

What you're looking at

The figure sits slightly left of center, her back against a bank of shrubs, legs folded under a skirt that spreads across almost half the canvas. She wears a frilled bonnet trimmed with pink ribbon, tied under the chin. Her head is bowed, eyes down to a book or folded paper held in both hands in her lap. Her face is drawn with very little: a single warm shadow along the cheek, a dark stroke for the eyebrow, a touch of red at the mouth.

The light is what Monet painted. Patches of sun fall across her skirt as flat dabs of almost pure white with a hint of pink, laid on top of the cooler lilac-gray of the shadowed fabric. More spots of light sit on the grass at her feet and on the leaves behind her head. Beyond her, at right, the lawn opens into full sun, a brighter yellow-green band that makes the shade around her feel cooler. The foreground is a meadow of little white and yellow flowers done in quick dots and dashes. Monet's signature sits in dark paint at lower right.

Argenteuil, spring 1872

Monet came back to France late in 1871 after a year in London and the Netherlands, where he had sat out the Franco-Prussian War. Through Édouard Manet he found a house to rent in Argenteuil, then a small town with a boating basin, gardens and a fast train to Paris. The garden of that first house became one of his favorite outdoor studios. In 1872 and 1873 he painted Camille there again and again, among lilacs and dahlias, sometimes with their son Jean or with friends.

The Argenteuil years are covered on Monet at Argenteuil. The closest relatives of Springtime are the two pictures of figures resting under the lilac bushes in the same garden, Lilac in the Sun and Lilacs, Gray Weather, and the slightly later Camille Monet on a Garden Bench.

How it was painted

The canvas is small, about 50 by 65 centimeters, the kind of size Monet could carry outside and finish in a few sessions. He builds the dress in long, curving strokes of thin color and adds the sunspots last, thick and wet. The academic rule of the time put the face and hands first; Monet treats them as just another part of the light. That inversion struck Émile Zola, who in 1876 singled out a portrait of a woman in white sitting in the shade of foliage, her dress scattered with spots of light like large drops. The description fits this canvas closely.

Exhibition and ownership

Springtime was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1876, apparently under the plainer title Woman Reading. It is thought to have passed through the collection of Ernest Hoschedé, the department-store magnate whose family would later join Monet's household. It came to Baltimore with the collection of Henry Walters and now hangs in the Walters Art Museum. That makes it one of the less familiar Monets in the United States, outside the large holdings in New York, Boston and Chicago; where to see Monet's paintings lists them.

Why it matters

Alongside the large figure paintings of the 1860s, such as Women in the Garden, Springtime shows how far Monet had moved in five years. The figure is no longer posed and modeled; she is a surface for light. The quiet subject, a woman reading out of doors, also places the picture in a long tradition of garden reveries, which helps explain why it remains one of the most reproduced images of Camille.