Woman with a Parasol by Claude Monet

Woman with a Parasol by Claude Monet

Looking up into the wind

The full title is Madame Monet and Her Son. Monet painted his wife, Camille, and their seven-year-old son, Jean, out walking at Argenteuil, and he painted them from below, so that she stands against the sky with the light behind her. Her white dress is shadowed with blue and yellow, taken from the sky and the grass; the veil blows across her face; the grass and wild flowers at her feet bend in the same wind. The green parasol tilts towards us. The brushwork is quick and open, as if the whole thing were done in a single session, and the picture is signed and dated 75 at the lower right.

Shown in 1876, repeated in 1886

Monet showed the painting at the second Impressionist exhibition, in Paris in 1876. Camille died in 1879. Ten years after this picture he returned to the subject at Giverny, with a pair of paintings of Suzanne Hoschedé holding a parasol in a meadow; she was the daughter of Alice Hoschedé, who later became his second wife. Those two pictures are now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Where it hangs

The painting has been in the National Gallery of Art in Washington since 1983, in the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, and measures 100 by 81 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 7,455-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 49 inches on its longest side.

Sources: National Gallery of Art, Washington · Wikidata Q2395218 · Wikimedia Commons