Primavera

Late in 1871 Monet moved his family to Argenteuil, a town on the Seine just outside Paris, and this is the garden there. The woman reading under the lilacs is Camille, his first wife. What he is really chasing is the light. Sun comes through the leaves in loose patches and falls across her pale muslin dress and the ground, and Monet lets those dabs of colour sit side by side unblended, so from a step back they resolve into flickering shade. He cared less about capturing Camille's likeness than about that filtered brightness. When the picture went into the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876 it carried the plainer title Woman Reading. Camille would be dead by 1879, still in her early thirties, and Monet painted her again and again in these Argenteuil years.