Porträt von Madame Claude Monet

In the early 1870s Renoir and Claude Monet were close friends who often painted side by side, and Renoir kept coming out to the little town of Argenteuil on the Seine where Monet had settled. The woman here is Monet's first wife, Camille Doncieux, who sat for both men so often that her face turns up across the whole early history of Impressionism. Renoir gives her a dark coat and a soft pale scarf, and paints the indoor scene with the loose, light-filled touch the two friends were working out together in these very years. This is 1873, the year before the group would hold its first independent exhibition in Paris and pick up the mocking nickname that stuck. Camille sat for many such pictures. She would die young, at 32, in 1879, worn down by illness and childbirth.