La Femme à l'ombrelle, Madame Monet et son fils

On a windy summer day in 1875 Monet took his family out to the fields near Argenteuil, the town outside Paris where he was living, and painted his wife Camille and their young son Jean from below, against a fast-moving sky. He worked quickly, in the open air, and you can feel it. Her white dress and veil are lifted and blurred by the wind, the grass leans, and small clouds race behind her. Monet was not making a formal portrait. Camille's face is barely there, just a shadow under the parasol, so that she reads less as a particular person than as a figure of light and movement. The green underside of the parasol throws a cool tint across her, and Monet has caught the exact way sun and cloud shift across a dress in a single moment. These were hard years for him, often short of money even as he painted scenes this bright. Camille would die only a few years later, still young. The picture came to Washington in 1983.