Camille: The Green Dress That Made Young Monet Famous

A Portrait in Green

Camille, also called The Woman in the Green Dress, is an oil painting that Claude Monet made in 1866. It is enormous for a portrait: about 231 centimetres tall and 151 centimetres wide, so the figure is shown full-length and at life size. A young woman stands against a dark, plain background and turns away from the viewer, as if she has just stepped past us and glanced back over her shoulder. With one hand she adjusts the ribbons of her small hat.

The real star of the picture is her clothing. She wears a long silk dress with broad stripes of green and black that shimmer where the light catches the folds. The skirt sweeps out behind her and trails across the floor. Over it she wears a short brown jacket trimmed with fur. The contrast between the cool, glossy silk, the soft fur and the dark background gives the painting much of its energy. Today it belongs to the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany, which acquired it in 1906.

Who Was Camille?

The model was Camille Doncieux, born in 1847 in Lyon. She met Monet in Paris in the mid-1860s, when she was about eighteen, and soon became his companion. Monet's family disapproved of the relationship, and for years the couple lived with very little money. Their first son, Jean, was born in 1867, and they married in 1870.

Camille became the most important model of Monet's early career. She appears in many of his best-known paintings: she posed for several of the figures in Women in the Garden, she and baby Jean shared the peaceful Normandy winter of 1868–1869 when Monet painted The Magpie, she stood on a breezy hill holding a sunshade in Woman with a Parasol, and she wore a red kimono in La Japonaise. She died in 1879, at only 32, but her image runs through more than a decade of Monet's art.

A Painting Made in a Hurry

Camille was not Monet's original plan for the Salon of 1866. He had been working on a gigantic outdoor picnic scene, Luncheon on the Grass, more than four metres high and about six metres wide, intended to impress the jury with a modern subject painted on the scale of a history painting. Camille and his friend Frédéric Bazille posed for several of its figures. But the canvas was too big and too ambitious to finish in time.

With the Salon deadline approaching, Monet changed course and painted Camille instead, reportedly in only a few days. Unlike his later Impressionist works, it was painted in the studio, not outdoors, and its dark background and bold, confident brushwork show the influence of painters he admired, especially Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. The unfinished Luncheon on the Grass had a sad fate: Monet later left it with a landlord as security for unpaid rent, and when he got it back years later it was damaged by damp. He cut it up, and two surviving fragments now hang in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Success at the Salon of 1866

The Salon was the great official art exhibition in Paris, held in the Palais de l'Industrie and visited by huge crowds. Getting a painting accepted was hard; getting it noticed among thousands of others was even harder. Camille managed both. Critics singled it out for its freshness and truth to life.

The most famous praise came from the young writer Émile Zola, then working as an art critic. In his review of the Salon he wrote that this was the canvas that held his attention longest, and he admired how real and lively the dress looked. Zola presented Monet as a painter who had left behind dull academic conventions and painted with energy and truth. For a 25-year-old artist with little money, this was a great boost.

Success also brought a small problem that followed Monet for years. His name was so similar to that of Édouard Manet, the most talked-about painter of the day, that people at the Salons of the 1860s confused the two. At first the older painter was irritated by the mix-up, but in later years the two became friends.

What Makes the Painting Special

At first glance Camille looks like a traditional fashionable portrait, but several features point towards Monet's future:

• The pose: instead of facing the viewer calmly, the figure is caught in movement, turning away. It feels like a passing moment rather than a formal sitting.
• The fabric: Monet painted the silk with long, rapid strokes that capture the way light slides over the folds. This interest in how light behaves on surfaces would become the heart of his art.
• Modern life: the subject is not a goddess or a historical figure but a young Parisian woman in fashionable clothes of the 1860s. Painting modern life on a monumental scale was a bold statement.
• Simplicity: there is no furniture and no detailed setting, only the figure and a dark curtain-like background, which makes the dress stand out even more.

Some historians also note that the face is less important than the clothes: Camille's features are shown in profile and partly in shadow. The painting is as much a picture of a dress and a gesture as it is a portrait of a particular person.

Fashion and Modern Life in the 1860s

To understand why a dress could be the subject of a major painting, it helps to know what Paris was like at the time. Under Emperor Napoleon III, the city was being rebuilt with wide new boulevards planned by Baron Haussmann, and it was the fashion capital of Europe. Large department stores such as Le Bon Marché were changing how people shopped, and illustrated fashion magazines spread the latest styles of dresses, hats and jackets.

Many young artists believed that painting should reflect this new world. In 1863 the poet Charles Baudelaire published an essay called The Painter of Modern Life, arguing that artists should capture the clothing, manners and passing moments of their own time instead of copying the past. Monet, Manet, Renoir and others took up this challenge. In Camille, the striped silk, the fur trim and the fashionable little hat are not just decoration: they are the painting's way of saying that the present day deserves to be painted on the same grand scale as myths and history.

From Salon Success to Rejection

The triumph of 1866 did not last. Determined to paint life-size figures in real daylight, Monet next painted Women in the Garden entirely in the open air, digging a trench in the garden so that he could lower the tall canvas and reach its upper part. The Salon jury rejected it in 1867. In the following years Monet was turned down again and again, and he and Camille often had barely enough money for food. These rejections eventually led Monet and his friends to organise their own exhibition in 1874, the event that gave the Impressionists their name.

In this sense, Camille stands at a turning point. It remained Monet's greatest success at the Salon, won with a large, studio-made figure painting in a fairly traditional style. After it, he moved step by step towards painting outdoors, in bright colour and with broken brushstrokes, the path that would make him the leading figure of Impressionism.

Interesting Details

• The painting's size, more than two metres tall, matches the large formats usually reserved for important official portraits, which shows how seriously the young Monet took his chance at the Salon.
• Monet painted Camille many more times. Ten years later he showed her full-length again in La Japonaise, but in a bright, playful spirit very different from this dark, serious portrait.
• The Kunsthalle Bremen holds the painting as one of the highlights of its French collection.