Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (Woman in the Garden Sainte-Adresse)

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Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (Woman in the Garden Sainte-Adresse): Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (Woman in the Garden Sainte-Adresse)

Keywords: Jeanne, Marguerite, Lecadre, Garden, Woman, Garden, Sainte, Adresse

Work Overview: Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (Woman in the Garden, Sainte-Adresse)
Claude Monet
Date: 1866
82x101 cm
Style: Impressionism
Genre: genre painting

This is a very early Impressionist work by the group's leader, Claude Monet. The sunlight which floods the paintings of the Impressionists - who did most of their painting out of doors, directly from nature - here plays the central role. Monet spent his childhood in Le Havre, which he periodically visited. The Le Coteaux estate at Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre belonged to Monet's cousin, Paul-Eugene Lecadre. Settling here in the summer of 1867, the artist painted several landscapes in the garden of the estate, of which "Woman in the Garden" is of central importance. Dressed in the fashion of the day, the figure of a lady was posed by Lecadre's wife. This lonely silhouette introduces an elegaic, sorrowful note into the painting whilst the bright, light area of the dress plays in important role in the balancing the composition and in demonstrating the interrelationship of light and colour.

Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (also known as Woman in the Garden, Sainte-Adresse), was completed in 1866, when Monet was just twenty-six years old. It appears the most composed, the most ordered of the four paintings; and well demonstrates Monet’s predilection for painting ordered nature, in the form of gardens and enclosed scenes. Three principal objects – Jeanne-Marguerite; the central white tree, in bloom, with red flowers underneath; and the yellower tree to the right – and their shadows, at equal distance from one another, structure the space. The vibrant reds of the flower bed complement the greenery, and throw the woman’s white, sun-lit dress into relief. There is a visual progression also from the vivid white of the dress through the blooming central tree, to the smaller trees and flowers which enclose the scene at the far right.

Monet would later depict shadows comprised of shades of blue, even in paintings of the summer. His experimentation with blue shadows was one of the things which led critics of his work in Paris in the 1870s to call his works ‘leprous’. In Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden the shadows are dark and solid, and the use of blue delimited to the sky in the upper right corner of the painting. The effect suggests a warm and still summer day. Yet the stillness of the sky, a block of blue more steely than azure; the solidity of the shadows and the other darker tones in the painting; its order; and the relative flatness of the canvas, of the brushstrokes in the grass and in the trees in the background – all this gives a sense of something staged and static. The light which illuminates the woman’s umbrella is not as luminous upon and does not pick out in the same way the trees to the picture’s centre and right. The overall atmosphere becomes somewhat unsettling, an image approximating that of the geometrically defined garden which features, intercut, in the film Last Year at Marienbad.

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Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (Woman in the Garden Sainte-Adresse)

Claude Monet

Work Overview