Woman in the Garden

What you are looking at

A sunlit garden, with a lawn sloping gently toward us. At its center is a round flower bed packed with red geraniums, and from it rises a standard tree covered in white blossom. Behind, a dense wall of dark trees and shrubs, poplars and evergreens, closes the space, with a strip of pale blue sky at the upper right.

A smaller yellow-green shrub glows to the right, and a line of standard roses runs along the far edge. On the far left, a woman in a long white dress stands with her back half turned, holding a white parasol. Her shadow and the shadows of the trees lie in dark blue-green patches on the grass.

The woman is small and pushed to the edge. The garden, and the sunlight in it, is the real subject. It is high summer, early afternoon, the shadows short and sharp.

Sainte-Adresse, 1867

Claude Monet spent the summer of 1867 at Sainte-Adresse, a seaside suburb of Le Havre, where his family had a house and his aunt Sophie Lecadre had a property with a garden. He was short of money; his father disapproved of his relationship with Camille Doncieux, who was in Paris expecting their first child; and he worked furiously, painting the garden, the beach and the regattas. This canvas, catalogued by Wildenstein as W.68, comes from that summer, a season that also produced the celebrated beach and terrace views, along with Garden at Sainte-Adresse and Regatta at Sainte-Adresse. The woman is usually identified as Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre, a cousin of the painter. The Normandy coast of Monet's youth is covered on Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

Monet was experimenting with painting figures in full outdoor light, as he had in the huge Women in the Garden the year before. Here the light is strong and clear. Look at the woman's dress: it is painted in white with cool blue and gray where it turns away from the sun, and her shadow is a sharp blue-green shape on the grass. The geraniums are dabs of pure red, tightly packed; the white blossom on the tree is laid on in thick, separate touches over the green.

The handling is still firmer than in his work of the 1870s. Forms are clearly outlined, the lawn is laid in with broad, smooth strokes, and the dark trees are modeled with real weight. What is new is the color of the shadows: not brown or black, as academic training taught, but colored by the sky and grass around them.

The composition is unusual. Monet puts the flower bed and tree at the center and the figure at the very edge, nearly cut by the frame, a choice that may owe something to the Japanese prints he was beginning to collect. The dark band of trees behind makes the lawn and the dress look even brighter, and the single slice of sky at upper right keeps the space from closing in completely.

The Sainte-Adresse gardens and how this one differs

That summer produced several garden pictures. In Garden at Sainte-Adresse, now at the Met, the garden is a terrace above the sea, with flags snapping and ships on the horizon. In Garden in Bloom at Sainte-Adresse, flowers fill the foreground. This picture turns away from the sea entirely. It is the most enclosed and private of the group, a hortus conclusus of lawn and trees with one quiet figure in it.

Where to see it

The painting is in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (ГЭ-6505). It was bought by the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin, one of the great early patrons of French modern painting, and entered the Hermitage in 1930 after his collection was nationalized. For other museums with Monet's early work, see Where to See Monet's Paintings, and for more portraits of women, Famous Paintings of Women.