Camille in green dress

In 1866 Claude Monet was 25, unknown and short of money, and the woman in this portrait was the reason his family was threatening to cut him off. She is Camille Doncieux, his model and companion, and later his first wife. That same year he made his name with a life-size painting of her in a green striped dress, reportedly done in a matter of days for the Paris Salon, where critics singled it out and gave him his first real notice. That large canvas is now in Bremen, in Germany. This is a smaller portrait of the same young woman from the same breakthrough year. Their life together stayed precarious for a long while. They married in 1870, and Camille died in 1879, barely into her thirties, after Monet had painted her again and again.