Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Woman with a parasol, by Claude Monet




                            Source:http://www.nga.gov/fcgibin/timage_f?object=61379&image=15634&c= 

The painting I’ve chosen is Woman with a parasol, by Claude Monet. It was painted in 1875. It’s an oil painting on canvas and its dimensions are overall 100x81 cm and framed 119,4 x 99,70 cm. At the moment it’s exhibited in the National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC. The artist sold it to Dr. Georges de Bellio. It had different owners Paul Mellon, a millionaire  bought it in 1965 and gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1985. The painting also had other names: Madame Monet and Her Son and The Walk.

On this painting we can see, in the background a very beautiful, lighting and blue sky with some white clouds. In the foreground we can see a woman, who is wearing a white dress with some blue shadows and a hat with veil. In her arms she has a green parasol. She seems to be serious and surprised. She is looking at the painter. Next to her, in the right part, there is a boy. He is small. He is wearing a hat and a blue shirt. He is looking at the painter too.

On the painting we can see a very colorful floor with green grass and colorful flowers. It’s a very luminous scene, the artist loves light and nature.

The body of the woman is located out of the center of the painting, but she is balanced by the parasol. Her pose creates an illusion of movement frozen in time. The two figures are standing on a hill and the wind is moving her voluminous dress.

The boy of the painting is Jean, Monet’s son, and the woman is his wife, Camille.

The artist wants to represent the gaze of the model. To get this the artist plays with the colors and with the light and shadows he wants to transmit the movement of the wind. The sun and the wind form a swirl in the center of the painting. The green of the parasol is a way to connect the parasol with the hill. As we can’ t only see half of the body of the boy only the artist gives us the impression that the hill is deep. Only light colors (blue, green, yellow, white..) are used in the painting, these colors give us an impression of relax and calm. The woman occupies most of the space in the painting. The parasol and his son form a triangle that completes the composition. The painting was painted in Musée d Orsay, Paris.

The painting was created in only one session. The sky was painted very fast. Monet painted the sky first and the grass is painted with different colors: green, blue, yellow and red.

At the time Monet painted this painting, people didn´t give so much importance to it. But the few comments the painting had were good. Monet didn´t give so much importance to the human figure before.

One important characteristic of Monet was that he loved painting à plein air (in the open air).

This painting belongs to a series of paintings which Monet produced during the summers of 1875 and 1876 in France.

Monet painted other two similar paintings in 1886 with another model .In this case the model is Suzanne, the daughter of a Monet´s friends, Alice and Ernest  Hoschedé.


You can see that the paintings are very similar to the other one in which the model is Camille. The technique is the same. The model is wearing a white dress and she has a parasol in her hands. The colors are similar too. And the pose is the same or very similar. In the first image the model is looking right and in the second one she is looking left.
Monet is an Impressionist artist because he use colors, atmosphere, sensations and representing his subjective point of view in their works. In specially he was interested on how the light could change a landscape.
There are also some painters who made paintings with the same theme. 
  • One of them was Renoir.


On this painting of Renoir we can see a woman with a white dress and a parasol in a garden, and in the background we can see a child, like in Monet’s painting. Renoir imitated his theme. Renoir was also an impressionist painter. 
  •  On this Seurat’s painting, we can see a woman with a parasol in a garden. Seurat was a Neo-impressionist painter. 

  • And Sorolla was a Spanish impressionist painter who imitated the theme of Monet. On this picture we can see like in the other ones two women with a white dress and a parasol in a natural environment.

There are also a lot of artists like,
  • John Singer (1888) 











  • Lawton Parker (1911)












  • Robert Reid (1907)

In my opinion the painting of Monet is very beautiful because it’s a very natural painting with a lot of nature and the model is very classic, her white dress and the parasol give her a classical and distinguished look. I like it also because it’s a very colorful and lightened painting.

Sources:

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Monica! You have done a good work! It is too complete and fantastic! see you :) byee

maria said...

You have done a very good work, it's very complete and it's fantastic...See youu:))

Paqui Pérez Fons said...

Hello Mónica,

Your painting wasn't painted at the Orsay Museum, but at Argenteuil, where Monet used to spend his leisure time, far from Paris.

Remember that the names of the paintings have to be in Italic font.


What I most like of your painting is how Monet captured the clouds in the sky. It seems as if his wife and child were floating among the clouds. Monet captured the moment very well.

Well done, Mónica. You deserve 9 points!