Claude Monet painted Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son in 1875, at a moment when Impressionism was still a contested proposition and the movement's founding figures were engaged in their most urgent experiment with light, colour, and the representation of outdoor experience. The painting shows Monet's wife Camille on a hillside, her son Jean slightly behind and below her; the viewpoint is low, so that the figures are seen against the sky rather than the landscape, the parasol casting its warm shadow across Camille's face and dress. The composition is built on the sensation of wind — the grass moves, the dress billows, the clouds shift — and on the way midday summer light bleaches and divides colour into its constituent sensations.
The work is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, a gift of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon. It was painted at Argenteuil, where Monet lived from 1871 to 1878, in the most productive period of his early career. Camille appears in many of his major works from this period; she died in 1879, aged thirty-two, and the paintings of her retain a particular quality of attention — she is always exactly herself, never a generalised figure, which is what separates Monet's best work from the merely Impressionist and places it in the category of portraiture, even when portraiture was not its stated purpose.
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Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public domain.
