Woman in the Garden

What you are looking at

A woman in a pale gray-white dress sits on a lawn in the lower right of the picture, her skirt spread around her on the grass. She wears a light straw hat and holds something dark, perhaps a book or a fan, in her lap. She is small in the composition and seems almost to dissolve into the grass around her, which is painted in many greens with bright patches of yellow where the sun breaks through.

Behind her, a long flowerbed of red and pink blooms crosses the canvas in a band. Beyond it rises the wall of a house or garden building, glowing yellow-gold in the sunlight, with young trees in front of it. Dark leaves hang down from a branch across the top right, framing the scene, and a thin tree trunk rises on the right. The whole picture is warm and sunlit, with the shadows on the grass painted in blue and violet.

A different picture from the 1867 Woman in the Garden

This is not the same work as Monet's better-known Woman in the Garden of 1867, also in the Hermitage, which shows his cousin's wife Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre standing beside a flowerbed at Sainte-Adresse. The 1876 canvas is smaller, freer and more fully Impressionist, and the figure has become part of the landscape rather than its subject.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted it in 1876, during his years at Argenteuil and the summer in which he also worked at Montgeron, the estate of his patron Ernest Hoschedé. The exact garden is not certain. It may be the garden of Monet's own rented house at Argenteuil, where Camille posed for many outdoor pictures, or a corner of the grounds at Montgeron, where Monet painted A Corner of the Garden at Montgeron and The Pond at Montgeron, both also in the Hermitage. The sitter is not identified; Camille Monet is a possibility.

How it was painted

The composition is built in horizontal bands: grass, flowerbed, building, foliage. The figure sits off-center, low and to the right, so that the eye moves across the whole lawn before finding her. The overhanging branch and thin trunk on the right act as a frame, a device Monet borrowed from Japanese prints.

The brushwork is loose and textured throughout. The grass is made of short, separate strokes of green, yellow and blue; the flowerbed is a dense mass of red and pink dabs; the building behind is laid in with warm yellows and oranges, its windows and shadows only suggested. The figure is painted with the same strokes as her surroundings. Her white dress is gray and lilac in shadow and creamy where the light falls, so that she belongs to the same play of sunlight as the lawn. It is a picture about a warm afternoon rather than about a person.

The light comes from behind and to the left, so the wall of the building is fully lit while the lawn in front is dappled with shade from trees we cannot see. Monet catches this by laying patches of brilliant yellow-green among cooler blue-greens, so the grass seems to flicker. The red flowers are the warmest note on the canvas and sit just above the figure's head, drawing the eye down to her. Even the dark object in her lap, a few strokes of black and blue, matters: it is the only strong dark in the lower half and anchors her in the composition.

Canvases like this, small and quickly painted, were also part of how Monet made a living in a difficult year. In 1876 he was short of money and selling to a small circle of collectors, including Hoschedé, Victor Chocquet and the painter Gustave Caillebotte. Light-filled garden scenes with a figure were among the easiest of his pictures to place.

Related works

The motif of a woman sitting or reading in a garden recurs throughout the 1870s, in Camille Monet on a Garden Bench (1873), Woman Seated on a Bench (c. 1874) and Monet's Garden at Argenteuil (1873). The later Woman Seated under the Willows of 1880 continues it at Vétheuil.

Where to see it

Woman in the Garden is in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (ГЭ-10615), where the Impressionist paintings are shown in the General Staff Building. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.