The Parc Monceau

What you are looking at

The canvas is tall, and most of it is trees. Dark masses of foliage rise on both sides and arch over the top, almost meeting, with flecks of white sky breaking through the leaves. In the gap between them, in the middle distance, the pinkish façade of a building glows in sunlight beyond the park.

Beneath the trees, along a sandy path dappled with orange-pink spots of sun, a crowd sits and strolls in the shade: women in light dresses and bonnets gathered on benches or chairs, a few children, nursemaids, someone holding an orange-red parasol and another a dark one. At the right, alone, a man in a dark suit and white shirtfront sits on a bench in deep shadow. In the foreground a sloping lawn cuts across the bottom of the picture, striped with bright yellow-green sunlight and blue-green shadow. Monet signed and dated the canvas "Claude Monet 78" at lower right.

Claude Monet painted the scene in the Parc Monceau, Paris, in 1878. The canvas measures 72.7 by 54.3 centimeters, is number 466 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Where and when

The Parc Monceau, in the wealthy 8th arrondissement, was laid out in the late eighteenth century as a private garden for the Duc de Chartres, with follies and fake ruins. In the early 1860s the city bought it and Haussmann's engineer Adolphe Alphand redesigned it as a public park, with gilded gates, curving paths and lawns, surrounded by grand new houses. It was a favorite place for well-off Parisian families, their nannies and children.

Monet painted it in the spring of 1876 and again in 1878. In January 1878 he gave up his house at Argenteuil and took an apartment in Paris, on the rue d'Edimbourg, where his second son, Michel, was born in March. He was nearly destitute, and that summer the family left for Vétheuil. This picture belongs to those Paris months, the same year as the flag-filled streets of Rue Montorgueil.

How it was painted

The strongest element is the light. Look at the foreground: the grass is painted in bright yellow-green where the sun falls and deep blue-green where shadow crosses it, in long diagonal strokes that sweep up from the lower left. That contrast pushes the shaded figures back and makes the scene feel like a hot afternoon. On the path, the sun comes through the leaves as separate spots of warm pink and orange, laid on the sandy ground in single dabs.

The figures are tiny compared with the trees, each a few touches of color, and the orange parasol is a single warm accent that draws the eye into the crowd. The foliage is built from countless short strokes of dark green, olive and black-green, with lighter touches where the sun penetrates. Notice how little sky there is. The upright format and the canopy make the picture enclosed and intimate, a pocket of shade inside the city.

Notice the man on the bench at the right. He sits apart from the group, almost lost in the dark of the trees, painted in near-black with a single stroke of white for his shirtfront and a touch of flesh for his face. He balances the bright crowd on the left and gives the picture a quiet, observing presence, a little like the painter himself watching the families at their leisure.

The motif and its siblings

Monet's city parks belong to the wider Impressionist interest in modern leisure. The Met also owns his 1876 view of the park, Landscape: The Parc Monceau, painted in a lighter, more open key. Compare the Tuileries seen from an apartment window in The Tuileries of 1876, and the Paris street scenes of The Boulevard des Capucines and Rue Saint-Denis. A few months later Monet left the city for good, for Vétheuil.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: see Monet at the Met. For the artist, see Claude Monet.