Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son

Claude Monet painted Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son in the summer of 1875 near his home at Argenteuil, on the Seine just outside Paris. His wife, Camille Doncieux, stands on a rise in a meadow, holding a green parasol against the sun, while their son Jean, about seven years old, waits a little farther off. The canvas, 100 × 81 cm, has belonged to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., since 1983. It is also known as The Stroll (La Promenade).

What you're looking at

We see Camille from below, as if Monet were sitting in the grass at the foot of the slope. That low viewpoint sets her against nothing but sky and clouds, so she seems to stand at the top of the world. The parasol tilts toward us, its underside a deep, cool green; the light hitting the meadow bounces up into it, which is why its lining picks up the same color as the grass.

The wind is everywhere. Camille's white veil streams sideways across her face, the hem of her dress billows to the right, and the clouds behind her are dashed in with quick diagonal strokes that run the same way. Even the grasses at her feet lean in the breeze. Monet unifies the picture through that single direction of movement rather than through careful drawing.

Look at the dress. It is "white," but almost none of it is painted white. The shadowed side is built from blues, lilacs and gray-greens; the sunlit side carries touches of yellow reflected from the meadow. This treatment of colored shadow, rather than shadow made by adding black, is one of the most important ideas of Impressionism, and it is easy to see here.

Jean, by contrast, is cut off at the waist by the brow of the hill. His round, pale face under a straw hat is a small, still point beside his mother's sweeping silhouette, and the gap between them gives the picture its depth. Camille's own face is barely described: a few strokes under the veil, enough to suggest a glance toward the painter.

How it was made

The painting was made outdoors, en plein air, and quickly, probably over a few hours. The brushwork is visible everywhere: long, loaded strokes for the dress, short choppy ones for the grass, scumbled patches for the clouds. Monet signed and dated it "Claude Monet 75" at the lower right. At 100 × 81 cm it is a sizable canvas to have worked on outdoors in a stiff breeze.

Context: Argenteuil, 1871–78

Monet, Camille and Jean lived at Argenteuil from late 1871 to 1878. These were relatively settled years, and Monet painted his family repeatedly in the house and garden there, in works such as The Luncheon (Monet's Garden at Argenteuil), Camille Monet on a Garden Bench and Madame Monet and a Friend in the Garden. Woman with a Parasol is the most monumental of them.

The picture was one of eighteen works Monet showed at the second Impressionist exhibition, held at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in April 1876. That November he sold it to Georges de Bellio, a doctor and collector who supported several Impressionists. It later passed through the de Bellio family and the Menier collection before Paul and Bunny Mellon bought it in 1965; they gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1983.

What does it mean?

Monet did not intend a portrait in the formal sense; it is a scene of everyday family life caught in passing light. Its emotional charge comes from what happened next. Camille fell ill in the following years and died in 1879, aged 32, at Vétheuil, an event Monet recorded in Camille Monet on Her Deathbed. Knowing this, many later viewers read the windswept, half-veiled figure as an image of transience: a woman who seems about to dissolve into the sky.

That reading belongs to hindsight, but the painting does invite it. Camille is the only fully vertical form, yet she is painted with the same loose, airy strokes as the clouds, and the veil hides the one feature that would fix her identity.

A subject revisited

In 1886, at Giverny, Monet returned to the motif with two paintings of Suzanne Hoschedé, his stepdaughter-to-be, holding a parasol on a hill: Woman with a Parasol, Turned to the Left and Woman with a Parasol, Turned to the Right, both now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. In those later versions the face is left almost blank, as if the figure had become pure weather. The 1875 picture, with Jean present and Camille glancing back, remains the more personal of the three.

John Singer Sargent, who knew Monet, painted his own variation on the theme, Two Girls with Parasols at Fladbury (1889), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For more, see Famous Monet Paintings.

Where to see it

The painting is in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.29), and is normally on view in the French Impressionist galleries. Admission is free. The work is in the public domain.