Women in the Garden

What you are looking at

Four young women in pale summer dresses gather in a garden on a bright day. In the foreground one sits on the grass in a vast white crinoline trimmed with black arabesques, a parasol tilted over her head so that her face falls into a cool shadow and a yellow ribbon glows at her neck; a bunch of flowers lies in her lap. Behind her, a woman in a cream dress buttoned down the front buries her face in a bouquet of red and white flowers, and beside her another, in a long dress striped green and white, stands in profile. On the right, a fourth woman in white with black dots hurries along a sunlit path and reaches up to pull at a branch of the tree, her back half turned. A slender tree trunk divides the canvas, its leaves forming a canopy across the top, and the gravel path curves away into the light.

The canvas is enormous: 255 cm high and 205 cm wide, with figures life-size. What Monet wants you to see is not the women's faces, which are barely described, but the light. Sun falls through the leaves in patches; it bleaches the path almost white; it makes the white dresses blaze where they are struck and turn blue-gray where they are shaded. Look at the seated woman's skirt: the shadow of the parasol lies across it as a band of cool blue, while its edge flares bright in the sun. Shadows here are colored, not brown or black, one of the key discoveries of Impressionism.

The dresses are worth a close look too. Their cut and trimmings follow the fashion plates of the mid-1860s, and scholars have noted that Monet may have used fashion magazines as well as models for the poses.

How Monet painted it

Monet began the picture in the spring of 1866 in the garden of a house he rented at Ville-d'Avray, west of Paris, and continued it the following year. His aim was radical: to paint a large figure composition entirely in the open air, under real daylight, rather than in the studio. To reach the upper part of the tall canvas without moving it indoors, he had a trench dug in the garden and lowered the canvas into it with a system of pulleys, so that he could work on the top while standing at ground level.

According to a story later told by Monet, Gustave Courbet visited him at work one day and was surprised to find him idle; Monet explained that he was waiting for the sun to return, because he would only paint the leaves in the right light. Camille Doncieux, Monet's companion and later his wife, posed for several of the figures. Because the picture could not be finished entirely outdoors, Monet completed parts of it in his studio in Honfleur.

The Salon rejection

Monet submitted Women in the Garden to the Salon of 1867, and the jury rejected it. One juror is reported to have complained that too many young painters were going down this road and it was time to stop them. The visible brushwork, the flat patches of light and the faces without detail all broke with academic standards of finish.

The rejection was a blow to the impoverished painter. His friend Frédéric Bazille, a wealthier fellow artist, bought the canvas for 2,500 francs, paid in monthly installments, to help Monet financially. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and the painting later returned to Monet, who kept it for decades.

Meaning and legacy

Women in the Garden is a manifesto. It takes the format of a Salon history painting and fills it with an ordinary modern scene and with sunlight, the subject that would define Impressionism. It grew out of Monet's earlier, unfinished picnic project, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and solved some of its problems by working outdoors from the start. After it Monet gave up such huge figure canvases, but the lessons about light and color carried through all his later work, from Camille Monet on a Garden Bench to Woman with a Parasol.

In 1921, at the height of his fame, Monet sold the painting to the French state for 200,000 francs, a striking reversal for a canvas that had once found a buyer only as an act of friendship. It entered the national collections, was later shown at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, and moved to the Musée d'Orsay when it opened in 1986. For a closer look at the canvas, see Women in the Garden (detail).

Where to see it

Women in the Garden hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, in the galleries devoted to early Impressionism, near the two fragments of Monet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. See also Impressionism and famous paintings of women.