Woman Seated under the Willows

What you are looking at

The canvas is upright. Willows rise on both sides, their thin, wavy branches reaching to the top edge and making a loose, lacy canopy of green, lilac and gray. Through the gap between them, at the center, we see a strip of river and, across it, a village of pale houses with dark roofs in soft sunlight, a squat tower among them. In the foreground, in a meadow of long green grass, a woman sits in a light dress and a hat with a red trim. She is small and low in the picture, close to the bottom edge, almost hidden by the grass.

The light is diffused and silvery, a spring or early summer day with a high, pale sky. The signature and date, "1880 Claude Monet," run along the lower left.

Vétheuil, 1880

Claude Monet lived at Vétheuil, on the Seine northwest of Paris, from 1878 to 1881. His wife Camille had died there in September 1879, and the months that followed were hard; he was in debt and sharing a house with Alice Hoschedé and her children. In the spring and summer of 1880 he painted the riverbanks around the village repeatedly.

This canvas, catalogued by Wildenstein as W.613, is one of them. The seated woman has sometimes been identified as Alice Hoschedé, but the figure is too small and summary for certainty. The Vétheuil years are gathered on Monet at Vétheuil.

How it was painted

Monet uses the willows like a stage curtain. Their trunks frame the view on left and right, and the branches meet overhead, so we look through them at the village beyond. The branches are drawn in long, fluid lines of brown, violet and green, and the leaves are tiny dabs that thin out toward the sky, which is a pale, warm white.

The grass is the busiest area: strokes go in every direction, in green, yellow and blue, with flecks of white flowers. The woman is built from a few touches, a cream dress, a dab of red on the hat, a dark hand, but she sits convincingly, her weight in the grass. Her head is bent; she seems absorbed in something on her lap and unaware of us.

Look at the distant village. It is painted in small, squarish strokes of pink, white and blue, more solid than anything else in the picture, which makes it look sunlit and far away. Between village and meadow, the river is a single pale band, barely more than a line of light.

The upright format is the key decision. A horizontal canvas would have made this a river view with trees at the sides; turned on end, it becomes a picture about height and enclosure, the willows soaring over a figure who sits near the ground. Monet used the same format that year for the meadow view at the Met, and in both the eye travels upward from close grass to a distant, sunlit village.

The pollarded willow on the left, with its swollen trunk and bristling shoots, is the same kind of tree Monet would paint six years later at Giverny in Willows at Giverny.

The Vétheuil riverbank pictures and how this one differs

In 1880 Monet painted Vétheuil mostly as a distant view across water, as in Vétheuil in Summer, or from the meadows, as in the upright View of Vétheuil with its poppies. This canvas combines both approaches and adds a figure. It is one of the few pictures from these years in which a recognizable person appears in the landscape at all, and the way she is half absorbed into the grass is characteristic of how Monet treated figures after Camille's death.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.178). For other museums with Monet's Vétheuil pictures, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.