La Japonaise: Monet's Portrait of Camille in a Red Kimono

A Woman in Red

La Japonaise (The Japanese Woman) is an oil painting that Claude Monet completed in 1876. It is one of the largest pictures he ever made of a single figure: the canvas measures 231.8 by 142.3 centimetres, so the woman in it is shown full-length and roughly at life size. Today it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the United States.

The picture is dominated by one thing: a magnificent red Japanese robe. A woman stands on a straw mat, turned slightly to the side, and looks back towards the viewer with a smile. In her raised right hand she holds an open folding fan. Her long kimono spreads out on the floor around her feet, and it is covered with thick, richly coloured embroidery. Behind her, the pale blue-grey wall is scattered with round Japanese fans, and more fans lie on the floor. The effect is bright, theatrical and full of pattern, almost like a stage set.

Camille in Costume

The model was Camille Doncieux, Monet's wife and his favourite model in the early years of his career. Ten years earlier she had posed for Camille, the portrait in a green striped silk dress that had brought the young painter his first success at the Paris Salon of 1866. That picture was also full-length and life-size, so La Japonaise can be seen as a kind of companion to it, painted when Monet was older, more confident and already famous as one of the Impressionists.

By 1876 the family was living in Argenteuil, a small town on the River Seine near Paris, where Monet painted many sunny scenes of boats, gardens and riverbanks. The year before, he had shown Camille and their son Jean on a windy hillside in Woman with a Parasol, a light and quickly painted outdoor scene. La Japonaise is very different: it was made indoors, it is carefully staged, and it is full of detail.

One curious detail is Camille's hair. In reality she had dark hair, but in the painting she wears a blonde wig. Art historians think Monet wanted to make it completely clear that this is a European woman dressed up in Japanese costume, not a Japanese woman. The painting is not a portrait of Japan; it is a portrait of the French fascination with Japan.

The Kimono and the Fans

The robe Camille wears is an uchikake, a long, heavy outer kimono worn open over other clothes. In Japan such robes were worn by high-ranking women on special occasions, including weddings, and also as stage costumes. Its lower edge is padded so that it trails along the floor in a thick roll, which Monet painted with great care.

The most surprising part of the kimono is its decoration. Near the bottom of the robe, just below Camille's hand, there is an embroidered figure of a samurai warrior with a fierce face, who seems to be drawing his sword. Because the embroidery is so thick and so brightly coloured, the warrior almost looks as if he is leaping out of the cloth. His fierce face sits not far from Camille's own, and the two create a playful contrast: the calm, smiling French woman and the furious warrior on her dress.

The fans also deserve a closer look:

• The round fans on the wall and floor are uchiwa, flat Japanese fans that do not fold. They were cheap and popular souvenirs in Paris at the time.
• The fans are decorated with flowers, landscapes and figures, and one of them, near Camille's head, shows the face of a Japanese woman who seems to be glancing towards her.
• The folding fan in Camille's hand is painted in blue, white and red, the colours of the French flag, which again reminds us that she is a Parisian playing a role.

The Craze for Japanese Art

For more than two hundred years Japan had kept itself almost closed to foreign trade. In the 1850s, under pressure from the United States and European powers, it began to open its ports. Soon Japanese goods were flowing into Europe: silk, porcelain, lacquerware, fans, screens and, above all, colourful woodblock prints called ukiyo-e, meaning "pictures of the floating world". Japan's display at the World's Fair in Paris in 1867 made Japanese art even more fashionable.

The French called this enthusiasm Japonisme. Shops in Paris sold Japanese objects, wealthy people decorated rooms with them, and artists studied the prints of masters such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. These prints showed everyday life, actors, landscapes and the weather in ways that seemed fresh and daring to European eyes: strong outlines, flat areas of bright colour, unusual viewpoints, and compositions cut off at the edges.

Many painters of Monet's circle were inspired by them, including Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and later Vincent van Gogh. Paintings of fashionable women posing in kimonos or with Japanese objects became a small fashion of their own in the 1860s and 1870s. With La Japonaise, Monet created one of the boldest and largest examples of this trend.

Monet and Japan

For Monet, the love of Japanese art was not a passing interest. Over his lifetime he built up a collection of more than two hundred Japanese prints, including works by Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro. A popular story claims that he first discovered them when he saw prints used as wrapping paper in a shop in the Netherlands, but this tale may well be a legend. What is certain is that the prints later covered the walls of his house at Giverny, where they can still be seen today.

The influence of Japan on Monet goes much deeper than costumes and fans. In his later work, it shows in the way he cropped his views, in his series of the same subject painted at different times of day, and above all in his famous garden at Giverny. There he built a water garden with a green-painted Japanese footbridge arching over a pond filled with water lilies, a scene he painted again and again for the rest of his life. Interestingly, those later works absorb the spirit of Japanese art in a quiet, personal way, while La Japonaise shows Japanese objects directly, almost like a display of treasures.

Success at the Second Impressionist Exhibition

In 1874 Monet and his friends had organised their first independent exhibition, where Impression, Sunrise led a critic to mock the whole group as "Impressionists". Two years later, in 1876, they held their second exhibition in the gallery of the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris. Monet showed La Japonaise there, and it attracted a great deal of attention.

Reactions were mixed: some critics enjoyed its brilliant colour and humour, while others found it showy or puzzling. But the painting was a real success in one important way: it sold for 2,020 francs, a high price for Monet at the time. For a painter who often struggled to pay his bills, this was very welcome money.

Monet himself, however, later spoke about the painting rather dismissively. In his old age he described it as little more than a fancy, a piece he had made partly to please the public and the market. It did not fit the image of the painter of light and open air that he wanted to leave behind. Many modern viewers disagree with him and see it as one of his most joyful and inventive figure paintings.

From Paris to Boston

After its sale, La Japonaise passed through private collections for decades. In 1956 it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has one of the largest collections of Monet's paintings outside France, as well as one of the world's great collections of Japanese art. This makes Boston a fitting home for a painting that brings the two worlds together.

In 2015 the painting became the centre of a public debate. It had recently returned from an exhibition tour in Japan, and the museum began an event called "Kimono Wednesdays", in which visitors could try on a replica of the kimono and pose for photographs in front of the painting. Some protesters argued that the event treated another culture's clothing like a costume and repeated old European stereotypes about Asia. Other people, including some Japanese and Japanese American visitors, disagreed and said that sharing the kimono was a friendly way to appreciate Japanese culture. The museum stopped letting visitors wear the kimono, allowed them to touch it instead, and organised discussions about the history of Japonisme. The discussion showed that a painting made in 1876 can still raise questions about how cultures look at and borrow from each other.

Interesting Details

• The kimono's red, which fills most of the canvas, is built up from many layered shades, from orange to deep crimson.
• Unlike most Impressionist pictures, La Japonaise is carefully planned and highly finished, which shows that Monet could paint in a detailed, polished way when he wanted to.
• The mat, the fans and the robe give the picture a flat, decorative look, similar to the bold patterns of Japanese prints, even though the figure itself is modelled in light and shadow.
• When Monet painted it, Camille had only a few more years to live. She died in 1879, and La Japonaise remains the most colourful and playful image of her that he created.