The Garden (Argenteuil, 1876)

The Garden (Сад) is a painting by Claude Monet of the small garden of his house at Argenteuil in 1876, filled with sunlight and summer growth, with his wife Camille seated almost unnoticed in the lower left corner. Catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 411, it is in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (inventory ГЭ-10616). It is one of the least known of Monet's Argenteuil garden pictures, and one of the most enclosed.

What you're looking at

There is no sky. The whole canvas is garden, closed off at the back by a dark wooden paling fence and a wall of young trees. The upper half is dominated by a broad canopy of foliage struck by the sun, painted in thick, loose strokes of yellow, gold and ocher over darker green, so that it seems to blaze. Beneath it the shaded background is built from thin vertical strokes in cool blue-green and violet, with slivers of light between the trunks.

At the right, two tall stems of red hollyhocks (or mallows) rise as vertical accents, their flowers small scarlet dabs. A path runs off to the right behind them. In front, a sunlit lawn spreads across the lower third in warm yellow-green horizontal strokes, with a low clump of silvery blue-green leaves near the center, perhaps cabbages or ornamental plants. In the lower left corner, in the shade, Camille sits on the grass in a pale gray-white dress and a white hat, her head bent, possibly sewing or reading. The signature is at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

Monet lived at Argenteuil, on the Seine northwest of Paris, from late 1871 to early 1878; from 1874 the family rented a house near the station with its own garden, which he painted many times. 1876 was a year of financial difficulty but also of intense work out of doors, the year of Dans la prairie, with Camille reading in a meadow, and of the decorative commissions for Ernest Hoschedé at Montgeron. See Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

The Russian description of the picture notes the contrast between the warm, horizontal strokes of the sunlit foreground and the thin, vertical, cool strokes of the shaded trees behind. Monet uses that contrast of direction and temperature to separate the planes without any linear perspective. The yellow canopy is laid on thickly in short, curving dabs that suggest moving leaves.

How it compares

Monet's earlier Argenteuil garden pictures, such as The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil with its dahlias, or Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, open up to a sky and give the figures more presence. Here the garden is a closed room of foliage and Camille is reduced to a small pale shape, an approach closer to the decorative panels he was about to paint for Hoschedé, among them Corner of the Garden at Montgeron, also in the Hermitage. For a garden of his own on a grand scale, see Giverny.

A garden painter before Giverny

Monet is now so closely identified with Giverny that it is easy to forget how long he had been painting gardens before he moved there in 1883. At Sainte-Adresse in the 1860s, at Argenteuil in the 1870s and at Vétheuil around 1880, he planted flowers wherever he lived and painted them. This canvas, with its hollyhocks and sunlit lawn, shows the same pleasure in growing things that would later shape the water garden.

Where to see it

The painting is in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, which holds one of the major groups of Monet's paintings outside France, mostly from the collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. How and when this particular canvas entered the museum is not stated in the sources consulted. For other places to see Monet, see where to see Monet's paintings.