The Walk Woman with a Parasol

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The Walk Woman with a Parasol: Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - The Walk Woman with a Parasol

Keywords: Walk, Woman, Parasol

Work Overview: Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son
Claude Monet
Date: 1875
Dimensions: 39.4 × 31.9 in 100 × 81 cm
Style: Impressionism
Genre: genre painting
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, sometimes known as The Stroll (French: La Promenade) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet from 1875. The Impressionist work depicts his wife Camille Monet and their son Jean Monet in the period from 1871 to 1877 while they were living in Argenteuil, capturing a moment on a stroll on a windy summer's day.

Monet's light, spontaneous brushwork creates splashes of colour. Mrs Monet's veil is blown by the wind, as is her billowing white dress; the waving grass of the meadow is echoed by the green underside of her parasol. She is seen as if from below, with a strong upward perspective, against fluffy white clouds in an azure sky. A boy, the Monets' seven-year-old son, is placed further away, concealed behind a rise in the ground and visible only from the waist up, creating a sense of depth.

The work is a genre painting of an everyday family scene, not a formal portrait. The work was painted outdoors, en plein air, and quickly, probably in a single period of a few hours. It measures 100 × 81 centimetres (39 × 32 in), Monet's largest work in the 1870s, and is signed "Monet 75" in the lower right corner.

The painting was one of 18 works by Monet exhibited at the second Impressionist exhibition in April 1876, at the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. Ten years later, Monet returned to a similar subject, painting a pair of scenes featuring his second wife's daughter Suzanne Monet in 1886 with a parasol in a meadow at Giverny; they are in the Musée d'Orsay. John Singer Sargent saw the painting at the exhibition in 1876 and was later inspired to create a similar painting, Two Girls with Parasols at Fladbury, in 1889.

Monet sold the painting to Dr. Georges de Bellio in November 1876. It was inherited by de Bellio's daughter and her husband Ernest Donop de Monchy, acquired by Georges Menier in Paris, and sold in 1965 to Paul Mellon. He donated the painting to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1983.

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Claude Monet (1840-1926), a French artist, is a famous French landscape painter, and advocate of the Impressionist movement in art. Impressionism in painting focused on what the eye perceives by looking at colors of objects in varying degrees of sunlight. En plein aire, or painting outdoors, was a characteristic of Monet’s work, and of the Impressionism movement in art. Monet painted with oil paints on canvas, with only white, red, blue, and green colors. His shadows are mixed colors, usually dark violets, and no black was ever used in his paintings. Monet believed that if the lights and darks of nature are painted, the painting will then take shape.

Background
The painting Woman With a Parasol-Madame Monet and Her Son belongs to a series of paintings which Monet produced during the summers of 1875 and 1876. The landscape background in the series of paintings depicts the garden surrounding Monet’s second home in Argenteuil, the suburbs of Paris, and along with the poppy-covered fields in Colombes and Gennevilliers. Monet’s wife Camille served as his model for Woman with a Parasol along with his son, Jean, who was eight years old at the time of the painting.

Description
Monet’s beautiful landscape scene depicts Camille, dressed in a voluminous, white dress, with a veiled hat, carrying a parasol. She is standing on a hill of green, silhouetted against a dazzling blue, swirling sky. Monet’s son is standing off in the background in the field, as a moment is captured in a painting. The moment depicted seems to be Camille catching a glimpse of someone looking at her.

Monet’s masterful depiction of light shows in this painting. There is also a very convincing depiction of movement in the air. Monet captures the fleeting effects of the sunlight, using shades of dark and light colors to indicate shadows, and sunlit areas, which is characteristic of his style. The grass is created with abbreviated, comma-like strokes, and quick, strong, wispy strokes of varying size and direction create the boundless sky, in an informal but masterful way.

Camille is made to look majestic or statuesque due to perspective, yet the true subjects of Monet’s paintings are color and movement. The way in which he mixes colors, creating shadows, and the brushstroke creating fluidity, make the scene realistic, with the viewer almost feeling the openness of the outdoors. Although Monet created this painting as an experiment, and for his own practice, it is one of his most famous paintings. It is currently in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C.

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