Woman Seated on a Bench

Monet painted this in 1874, the year he and his friends hung their work in a Paris photographer's studio and a critic borrowed the title of one canvas, Impression, Sunrise, to mock the whole group as mere Impressionists. The name stuck. You can see why it puzzled people here. The woman on the garden bench, her parasol propped beside her, is built from quick loose strokes, more suggestion than description, her face barely modelled. For years she was taken for Camille, Monet's wife. She was in fact a hired model who also sat for Degas. The golden light on her dress is laid down in the same shorthand the critics found unfinished.