Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert

In 1868 Monet was in real trouble: broke, turned down by the Salon, with Camille and a baby son to feed. That summer he wrote to a friend that in his despair he had thrown himself into the water. One of the few people keeping him afloat was Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, a merchant in Le Havre who commissioned portraits of his family. This near-life-size picture of Gaudibert's young wife, Marguerite, is what Monet painted in return. It is a formal society portrait, the sort of thing that sold, yet she turns almost entirely away, her face barely visible, the painter's whole attention on the light sliding down her heavy patterned gown. Marguerite died young, in 1877, at about thirty.