Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son
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.
Description
Monet's light and spontaneous brushwork create 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 upwards perspective, against fluffy white clouds in an azure sky. A boy, their seven-year-old son, is placed further away, concealed behind a rise in the ground, only visible 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), his largest work in the 1870s, and is signed "Monet 75" in the lower right corner.
History
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.
Provenance
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.
Gallery
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Monet, Woman with a Parasol, facing left, 1886
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Monet, Woman with a Parasol, facing right, 1886
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John Singer Sargent, Two Girls with Parasols at Fladbury, 1889
References
- Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, National Gallery of Art
- The Stroll, Camille Monet and Her Son Jean (Woman with a Parasol), artchive.com
- Monet Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, C. Monet Gallery
- Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology, edited by Mary Tompkins Lewis, p.231-232
- Monet and His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life, By Mary Mathews Gedo, p.161-163
