Woman with a Parasol: Monet's Windy Summer Portrait of His Family

A Moment on a Windy Day

Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son is an oil painting that Claude Monet made in 1875. It shows a woman in a light summer dress standing on top of a grassy slope, holding a green parasol against a bright sky full of drifting white clouds. A little further back, half hidden by the curve of the hill, stands a small boy in a hat. The woman's veil and the edges of her dress are lifted by the wind, and the grass around her feet seems to ripple in the same breeze.

The painting measures about 100 by 81 centimetres, so it is a fairly modest size, much smaller than the grand canvases Monet had once painted for the official Salon. Because of its subject it is sometimes called The Stroll or The Walk, although Monet used the word "promenade" in the titles of several other works as well. Today it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it is one of the best-loved paintings in the collection.

Camille and Jean

The woman is Monet's wife, Camille Doncieux, and the boy is their elder son, Jean, who was born in 1867 and was about seven or eight years old when the picture was painted. Camille had been Monet's favourite model since the mid-1860s. Nine years earlier, in 1866, she had posed for Camille, the life-size portrait in a striped green silk dress that brought the young painter his first big success at the Salon.

The contrast between the two pictures says a great deal about how much Monet had changed. In 1866 Camille stood in a dark, studio-like space, carefully posed in an expensive gown. In 1875 she is outdoors, surrounded by light and air, caught in the middle of an ordinary family walk. She looks down at the painter as if he has just called out to her, and the whole scene feels unplanned and alive.

Life at Argenteuil

From late 1871 the Monet family lived in Argenteuil, a small town on the River Seine a short train ride from Paris. These were some of the happiest years of Monet's life. The town had gardens, fields, riverside paths and a busy sailing harbour, and Monet painted all of them again and again. He even fitted out a small boat as a floating studio so that he could work on the river itself.

Argenteuil also attracted his friends. Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet came to paint with him there, and in the summer of 1874 both of them painted pictures of Camille and Jean in the Monets' garden. Those years were also the time when Monet and his fellow artists took a bold step: in 1874 they organised their own independent exhibition in Paris, where Monet showed Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave the new movement its name. Woman with a Parasol, painted the following summer, shows the Impressionist approach at its freest and most confident.

Life at Argenteuil was not free of worries. Money was often short, and Monet frequently had to borrow from friends and patrons. Yet his paintings from these years are full of sunshine, flowers, boats and family moments, and this one is perhaps the most famous of them all.

Painted in the Open Air

Like many of Monet's works from this period, Woman with a Parasol was painted outdoors, directly in front of the scene, rather than in a studio. The Impressionists called this working en plein air, French for "in the open air". It had become much easier thanks to paint sold in portable metal tubes and to light folding easels, which allowed artists to carry their equipment into the countryside.

The painting looks as if it was made very quickly, probably in a single session, and that speed is part of its charm. Monet did not try to describe every detail. Instead he used short, loose brushstrokes to catch what he saw in a passing moment:

• The sky is built from broad, sweeping strokes of blue and white that suggest clouds moving across it.
• The grass is made of quick flicks of green, yellow and touches of other colours, so that it seems to sway.
• The dress and veil are painted with long, curving strokes that follow the direction of the wind.
• The faces are only lightly indicated. Camille's features are softened by her veil, and Jean's face is just a few touches of colour.

Looking closely, the picture almost breaks apart into separate marks of paint. Stepping back, those marks come together into a convincing impression of wind, light and movement. This is exactly what Monet wanted: not a precise record of how his family looked, but the feeling of being there on that breezy summer day.

Looking Up from Below

One of the most striking features of the painting is its viewpoint. Monet placed himself below Camille, so we look up at her from the bottom of the slope. Her figure rises against the sky, and her head and parasol almost reach the top edge of the canvas. This low angle makes her seem tall and graceful, and it lets the sky fill most of the background.

Because she is seen against the light, much of Camille's figure is in shadow. Yet the shadows are not grey or black. Monet painted them in blues, greens and soft violet tones, because shadows outdoors reflect the colours of the sky and the surrounding grass. Her white dress is not simply white either: it shows hints of yellow where the sun strikes it and cool blue where it falls into shade. The green underside of the parasol even casts a greenish glow on her face and shoulders.

The composition is simple but carefully balanced. The diagonal of the parasol, the slope of the hill and the movement of the clouds all lead the eye upward and across the picture. Jean, smaller and lower, stands slightly apart, which adds depth and gives the scene the relaxed feeling of a real family outing rather than a formal portrait.

A Portrait or a Study of Light?

Although it shows the painter's own wife and son, Woman with a Parasol is not a portrait in the usual sense. A traditional portrait focuses on the sitter's face, character and social position. Here Monet seems more interested in the effects of sunlight, the colour of shadows and the movement of air. Camille and Jean are part of the landscape, just like the grass and the clouds.

At the same time, the painting has a warmth that comes from its personal subject. It records a real moment in the life of a young family. That makes it especially touching to look back on, because Camille fell seriously ill a few years later and died in 1879, when she was only 32. Monet continued to paint her until the end, and pictures such as this one keep her memory bright and full of life.

The Later Women with Parasols

Monet returned to the same idea more than ten years later. In 1886, by then living at Giverny, he painted two new pictures of a woman with a parasol standing on a hillside against the sky, one turned to the left and one to the right. The model was Suzanne Hoschedé, a daughter of Alice Hoschedé, who later became Monet's second wife. Both paintings now belong to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

These later versions are even less concerned with the person. Suzanne's face is barely defined at all, almost blurred into the light and the fluttering scarf around her. Some writers have suggested that the subject reminded Monet of the earlier painting of Camille, but whatever his feelings, the later pictures show how far he had moved towards painting pure atmosphere, a direction that would lead to his famous series of haystacks, cathedrals and water lilies.

From Argenteuil to Washington

Woman with a Parasol passed through several private collections before it came to the United States. It belonged to Paul Mellon, a major American art collector, and his wife, Bunny Mellon, and in 1983 it was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington as part of the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Visitors can see it there free of charge, alongside other important Impressionist paintings.

Why It Still Delights Viewers

The painting is often used to show what Impressionism was about, and it is easy to see why. It captures something everyone has experienced: a bright day, a strong breeze, and someone we love turning to look at us. Monet painted it with such speed and freshness that we can almost feel the wind on our faces.

It also marks a high point in the story of Camille as Monet's model. A year later he painted her in a completely different mood in La Japonaise, dressed in a bright red kimono and surrounded by Japanese fans. Seen together, these pictures show the many sides of the woman who inspired so much of Monet's early work, and Woman with a Parasol remains the one in which she seems most free.