Femmes au jardin

Monet was 26 and nearly broke when he took on this canvas, and he made it deliberately enormous, over two and a half meters tall. That created a problem. To keep a single, consistent viewpoint while painting the upper half, he dug a trench in the garden and had the canvas lowered into it on a pulley so he could always work at the same level. His companion Camille posed for most of the women, though he blurred the faces rather than paint portraits. What he was really after was the dappled light falling through the trees onto white summer dresses, the shadow of leaves crossing a woman's face. The Salon rejected it in 1867, unhappy with those loose, visible brushstrokes and the lack of any real story. Those same brushstrokes are what everyone would soon call Impressionism.