The Garden of the Infanta

What you are looking at

The canvas is tall and the view drops steeply. At the bottom, directly below us, is a neat lawn edged with sandy paths, low hedges and small clipped shrubs: the Jardin de l'Infante, the formal garden along the south side of the Louvre. Beyond its railings runs the quay along the Seine, crowded with tiny figures, carriages and omnibuses under a line of trees, with a small kiosk at right.

Then the city spreads out across the river: rows of grey and cream buildings, chimneys and roofs, the trees of the Left Bank, and, rising above them all at the center, the dome of the Panthéon. A second, smaller dome stands at right, and a French tricolor flies among the trees. The upper half of the picture is sky, heaped with white and grey clouds with a single patch of deep blue at the top. Monet signed the canvas at lower right.

Claude Monet painted the view in the spring of 1867. The canvas measures 91.8 by 61.9 centimeters, is number 85 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio.

Where and when

In April 1867 Monet, aged 26, received permission to paint from the Louvre, and he set up on the balcony of the east colonnade. Instead of copying old masters, as students had for generations, he painted the city outside. He made three views from the building: Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, looking east; Quai du Louvre, looking along the river; and this one, looking south across the Seine toward the Left Bank. It was a pointed choice, and a declaration of what modern painting should look at.

That spring his large figure painting Women in the Garden had been rejected by the Salon. Paris was full of visitors for the Universal Exhibition, and Monet, very short of money, may have hoped that bright views of the city would sell.

How it was painted

The vertical format is what makes this picture striking. Monet stacks the view in horizontal bands, garden, quay, river bank, city, sky, and the high viewpoint tilts the garden up toward us almost like a map. That flattening of space recalls the Japanese prints just becoming fashionable in Paris; Japan had its own pavilion at the 1867 exhibition, and Monet became a keen collector.

Look at the crowd along the quay. Each person is a single stroke or dot, and the carriages are a few dark marks, a shorthand Monet would push further in The Boulevard des Capucines. The lawn is painted in long, even strokes of green, the brightest color in the picture, while the trees are softer masses of dark and light green. The clouds are thick, quick touches of white over grey, with more texture than anything below them.

The city is handled with surprising restraint. Buildings are blocks of cream and grey with a few dark accents for windows, and the Panthéon's dome is a simple pale shape against the clouds, exactly at the center of the canvas.

The Panthéon also appears on the horizon of Quai du Louvre, painted from the same balcony in a horizontal format. Seen side by side, the two pictures show how Monet used the shape of the canvas to change one skyline: a broad, airy panorama in one, a steep, layered descent from clouds to lawn in the other.

The name

The garden is named after the Infanta Mariana Victoria of Spain, who as a small child in the 1720s was betrothed to the young Louis XV and lived in the Louvre for a time. The engagement was broken off and she was sent home, but the name stuck.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, one of the finest college art museums in the United States, which acquired it in 1948. For a later Paris view from above, see The Tuileries of 1876. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist, Claude Monet.