Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son

French: La Femme à l'ombrelle — Madame Monet et son fils
Artist Claude Monet
Year 1875
Type Oil
Medium Canvas
Dimensions 100 cm × 81 cm (39 in × 32 in)
Location National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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, spontaneous brushwork creates 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 upward perspective, against fluffy white clouds in an azure sky. A boy, the Monets' seven-year-old son, is placed further away, concealed behind a rise in the ground and visible only 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), Monet's 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 Georges de Bellio in November 1876. It was inherited by de Bellio's daughter Victorine 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.

References

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