Walk near Argenteuil

En promenade près d'Argenteuil (Walk near Argenteuil) is a summer landscape by Claude Monet in which three small figures, his wife Camille, their son Jean and an unidentified man, walk through a meadow full of wildflowers outside Argenteuil. Painted in 1875 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 379a, it was given to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris by Nelly Sergeant-Duhem in 1985.

What you're looking at

A wide field fills the lower two-thirds of the canvas, thick with tall grasses and flowers: dabs of red and coral poppies at the left, cornflower blue and violet scattered everywhere, and touches of yellow and white. A path seems to run diagonally through the grasses from the lower left toward the center.

On it walk two adults. The man, on the left, wears a gray suit and a light hat and holds a dark green parasol; next to him Camille, in a long white dress and a white hat with a pink ribbon, also shelters under a dark green parasol, her skirt blown out sideways by the wind. Further right and a little behind, Jean, in a straw hat and dark clothes, is half-submerged in the grass. A tall tree with blue-green and silver foliage fills the right side of the picture, its leaves flickering. Behind, a low line of dark trees marks the horizon, and the sky above is crowded with white and gray clouds broken by patches of blue. The signature is at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

In the summers at Argenteuil, Monet often walked out with Camille and Jean into the fields around the town and painted them there. The Marmottan's notice describes how the intimate scenes of mother and child gave way to broader compositions like this one, in which the figures are reduced to accents in the landscape. The same year he painted Woman with a Parasol, where Camille and Jean are seen close up against the sky, and two years earlier Poppy Field, whose descending figures are the best-known image of these walks. See Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

The museum singles out the work's typical Impressionist traits: a study made on the spot, forms with soft edges, a light palette and touches of pure color. The flowers are laid in as separate dabs of unmixed red, blue and yellow; the figures are only a few strokes each, the faces left unmodeled. The open parasols and Camille's wind-filled skirt carry the sense of a gusty day, and the tree's foliage at right is painted in quick, broken touches that seem to move.

How it compares

Set beside Poppy Field (1873, Musée d'Orsay), the composition is similar, with figures wading through a flowering field under a cloudy sky, but here the figures walk across the field rather than down a slope toward us, and the tree on the right gives the picture a firmer frame. Compared with the bold silhouette of Woman with a Parasol, Camille here is one element of the landscape among many. The unidentified man has sometimes been taken for a family friend; the museum leaves him unnamed.

Figures in the landscape

In the 1860s Monet had wanted to make his name with large figure paintings, such as the life-size Luncheon on the Grass and Women in the Garden. At Argenteuil the balance shifted. His family still appears constantly, but more and more as part of the scenery, carried along by wind and light. Walk near Argenteuil is a clear example: the figures give the meadow scale and movement, but the real subject is the field of flowers and the weather over it.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet, in Paris's 16th arrondissement, which holds the world's largest collection of Monet's work, largely from the bequest of his son Michel. This canvas came separately, as a gift from Nelly Sergeant-Duhem in 1985 (inventory 5332). See the Musée Marmottan Monet for other works there, including the museum's Argenteuil pictures.