Woman with a Parasol, Facing Left

What you are looking at

A young woman stands on a slope of meadow, seen from below so that she rises against a wind-blown sky of blue and white clouds. She holds a green parasol over her head, tilted back over her right shoulder; a pale scarf streams from her hat to the left, and her long white dress billows around her legs. She faces to the left, her body slightly turned, and her face is shadowed and blurred, with no features drawn.

A spray of red flowers at her waist is the only bright accent. In the foreground, grasses and wildflowers in yellow, pink, green and violet are blown in the same direction as the scarf. The signature and date "86" appear at lower left.

The canvas is tall, 131 centimeters high, so the figure is close to life size. The sun is behind and above her, which is why her face and the front of her dress lie in shadow.

Two studies, one sitter

In the summer of 1886 Claude Monet painted two large canvases of the same figure on the Île aux Orties, a small island in the Seine near Giverny: this one, facing left, and its pendant, Woman with a Parasol, Facing Right. Monet titled them Essai de figure en plein air, "study of a figure outdoors." The model was Suzanne Hoschedé, Alice Hoschedé's daughter, then about eighteen, who would later marry the American painter Theodore Butler. The village and its river islands are covered on Giverny.

The pictures deliberately recall Monet's 1875 Woman with a Parasol, Madame Monet and Her Son, in which Camille stands on a similar rise at Argenteuil. Camille had died in 1879. Many writers have seen the later pictures, with their faceless figure, as haunted by the earlier one, though Monet himself spoke only of the problem of painting figures in outdoor light.

How it was painted

Monet has dissolved the figure into the weather. Look at the dress: it is painted with the same blues, lilacs and whites as the clouds behind it, and in places the brushstrokes of sky and fabric run together. The shadow side of the dress is blue; the lit side is warm cream and pink. The parasol is green with a paler rim, and its color reflects down onto her face and shoulders.

The strokes everywhere follow the wind. The scarf, the skirt, the grasses and the clouds all lean the same way, so the whole canvas seems to move. The sky is painted in broad, curving swathes of blue and white, among the boldest brushwork Monet had used in a figure painting.

Compare her face with the 1875 Camille: there, features are suggested; here, there are none. A smudge of shadow under the hat brim is all we get. The veil or scarf that blows across the face adds to the effect, so that even the outline of the head is uncertain where it meets the sky. The person, in effect, matters less than the light around her.

The parasol pictures and how this one differs

In 1886 Monet was rethinking the figure. He had largely given up painting people in the 1880s, and these two canvases were a deliberate test of whether a figure could be painted with the same freedom as a landscape. The left-facing version is the more dramatic of the pair: bluer, more windswept, with deeper shadows and a stronger sense of movement. The right-facing canvas is paler and calmer.

Together they are among the last large figure paintings Monet made. After them he turned to the series of the 1890s, the Haystacks and Poplars, in which landscape alone carries the drama. Compare also Women in the Garden of 1866, his first attempt at life-size figures in sunlight.

Where to see it

Both 1886 paintings were given to the French state by Monet's son Michel in 1927 and hang in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (this one RF 2621). They are among the works described on Monet at the Musée d'Orsay; see also Famous Paintings of Women.