Monet | The Woman with a Parasol

About The Woman with a Parasol by Claude Monet

Monet painted this in 1875, in a field near his house at Argenteuil on the Seine. The woman is his wife Camille; the boy in the middle distance is their seven-year-old son Jean. It was almost certainly done in a single session outdoors, and it looks it — the whole canvas has the speed of something caught rather than composed.

He put himself low, so we look up at Camille against nothing but sky. She has turned back towards us, her face shaded by the parasol and dissolved almost to nothing. What the painting is really about is wind: her veil streams sideways, the skirt of her dress lifts and billows, the grass leans, and the clouds behind are dragged across the blue in long diagonal strokes going the same way.

Camille was already ill by this point. She died four years later, at 32, and Monet painted her one last time on her deathbed. When he returned to this composition in 1886 with a different model, he left the face blank entirely.

The Woman with a Parasol at a glance

• Artist: Claude Monet (1840–1926)
• Painted: 1875, Argenteuil
• Movement: Impressionism
• Original: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
• Medium: Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm

Common questions about The Woman with a Parasol

Own a hand-painted Woman with a Parasol

This is not a print. Every painting we sell is reproduced in oils on canvas, by hand, by professional artists — no giclée, no computer-generated technique.

The brightness of this picture does not come from the paint. Monet worked fast onto a pale ground and left it showing through everywhere — in the gaps between strokes in the grass, around the edges of the clouds, through the thin blue of the sky. Daylight passes into those thin passages, strikes the light ground beneath and comes back out, so the canvas glows from underneath rather than from its own surface. A print has no underneath. Every part of it reflects light identically off one flat film, which is why reproductions of outdoor Impressionist paintings so often look correct but curiously dull. Painted by hand in oils on a light ground, the depth is real and the daylight works the way Monet built it.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is a tall upright, and the composition depends on the height of sky above her.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
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Framing Options: You have 3 choices

Option 1. Choose an outer frame - see images below.

You only need to choose one and the painting will be sent to you framed and ready to hang.

* Below is an example of a customer who chose the Gold Ornate frame

Option 2: Choose a Gallery Wrap Stretched Painting.

If you want the frameless modern gallery wrap look then you only need to choose Stretched Gallery Wrap from the finish option dropdown.

You receive your stretched gallery wrap painting ready to hang - with a hanging wire attached behind.

The back of the Stretched Gallery Wrap looks like the image below - it has a hanging wire!

Option 3: Choose Canvas Only if you want to frame the painting yourself.

Your painting will be sent to you in an art tube - you can then frame it yourself or take it to your local framer.