Claude Monet : Woman with a Parasol Part.1

I. Woman with a Parasol

Among the masters of the modern era, there is no painter who cherished and revered light as much as Monet. From the misty morning haze casting orange hues over the sea at sunrise to the fiery shadows dancing across a summer meadow, from poplar trees reflecting sunlight like countless silver beads in the mountain breeze to the warm embrace of sunlight enveloping stone cathedrals on a cold day, from the dancing light on the surface of the Seine River to the light delving deep into haystacks and sighing on the petals of water lilies, Monet tenaciously pursued the ever-changing play of light throughout his lifetime. Since the moment he decided to become a painter, gazing upon the streets of Le Havre, a port city on the coast of northern France facing the English Channel, guided by the hand of his mentor Boudin, Monet’s artistry for nearly seventy years can largely be seen as an ode to light.

Even in this painting, where a young woman stands atop a hill in a white dress, holding a parasol, every corner of the canvas overflows with brilliant light. It is not the gentle light carefully entering through an opened window and delicately touching still life objects on a table, like Vermeer’s, but rather a flood of light that spreads and reflects freely, saturating the entire world like a deluge.

The summer sky, adorned with white clouds, stretches far and wide like an ocean of radiant light, its depths concealed from view. A woman, donning a parasol, stands cheerfully amidst a meadow as if she has just descended from the heavens above. Her billowing and elegant attire, along with the azure scarf that dances in the wind, give her an appearance of having arrived from the very sky itself. The composition, as if viewed from slightly below, serves to distinctly highlight her figure against the backdrop of the heavens. The white of her garments mirrors the color of the clouds in the sky, while the blue of her scarf mirrors the sky’s own hue. To render both the background and the motif in such harmonious colors is a formidable artistic feat, as it runs the risk of the primary subject becoming absorbed into the background. Monet was undoubtedly aware of this challenge, yet he chose to embrace it, confident in his ability to succeed. In the completed painting, not every contour of the woman is perfectly distinct. Nevertheless, her presence boldly emerges, claiming its place in the forefront of the canvas, outshining even the backdrop.

The lower third of the composition, which consists of a lush meadow, is composed with myriad touches of red, yellow, orange, blue, and green. It appears as if Monet has broken down the sunlight into the seven colors of the rainbow and distributed them meticulously onto each individual blade of grass. The area where the woman’s shadow extends forward is particularly striking, with intense reds and greens overlapping each other. Even shadows, for Monet, hold the essence of light.

When confronted with this artwork, one cannot help but feel as though they are standing in the very location where Monet once painted, basking in the refreshing light and breathing in the crisp air. It’s not just the light and the air; it’s also the delightful sensation of the wind brushing across the meadow and the invigorating scent of a summer’s day carried by the breeze. Indeed, we find ourselves transported to the fields of rural France, standing alongside the painter in this vividly evoked moment.

II. Outdoor Production

The vivid realism of this work primarily comes from the fact that it was actually drawn outdoors, in the field. Going out into the bright outdoors, setting up an easel, and drawing the landscape before one’s eyes is the most common form of painting production today. However, during the time when Monet was active, it was a highly innovative thing to do. In fact, until Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley set up their easels along the Seine, even for landscape paintings, artists typically only did simple sketches if they worked outside. As seen in Courbet’s famous work ‘The Artist’s Studio,’ artists often relied on their memory to paint landscapes in the studio. Of course, there were practical problems if you wanted to paint outdoors because there were no convenient tools like today’s paint tubes. In fact, in the mid-19th century, an American painter named John Rand invented paint tubes. If this invention had come about half a century later, the history of Impressionism might have been different.

However, it cannot be asserted that Impressionist painting emerged solely from the advent of paint tubes. Drawing outdoors was already an aspiration among artists as far back as the 1830s, during the era of the Barbizon School (a group of artists advocating for naturalism, and this term originated from the small village of Barbizon on the outskirts of Paris where they resided). The availability of convenient paint was merely a facilitator, making what was hitherto a formidable endeavor significantly more accessible.

Yet, it is undeniable that, thanks to this innovation, young artists in the 1870s found themselves liberated to paint en plein air at their leisure, uncovering a new world in the immediate presence of nature, hitherto unexplored by the traditional art of painting. In a word, it was a world brimming and overflowing with the radiance of sunlight.

III. The Emergence of Impressionism

What Monet and other Impressionist painters discovered in places like Le Havre or the streets of Argenteuil in the Paris suburbs was the fact that nature presents itself in various colors under the influence of sunlight. Traditional art theory had it that every object in nature possessed its intrinsic, immutable color. In other words, green grass was always green, and a blue dress remained steadfastly blue. The only variations were in the gradations of light and shadow, represented in various shades of gray, ranging from white to black.

However, Monet observed that, under the radiant glow of the sun, nature’s objects did not adhere to their fixed colors. Green grass, at times, shimmered with a reddish tint under the setting sun, and a blue garment might have an orange hue reflecting the sunlight. This was, undoubtedly, due to the interplay of light, and Monet fearlessly translated this play of light into the realm of color.

For instance, in “Woman with a Parasol,” the protagonist dons a white dress. This dress delicately captures hints of the blue sky or the rosy light of wildflowers. Thus, Monet added touches of light blue or pink to the white dress.

However, the people of that era, entrenched in their beliefs, found this far from easy to comprehend. Conversely, if there were traces of blue or pink on a white dress, some were inclined to interpret it as a pattern rather than a reflection of light. Indeed, when Renoir presented “Nude in the Sunlight,” currently held in the Musée d’Orsay, some critics failed to grasp the spots of light falling on the woman’s skin, and one critic even likened it to “a corpse covered with spots as if it had been stained with blood.”

This underscores how human vision was constrained by habit and convention when confronted with the unfamiliar. Impressionist artists like Monet sought a pure sensory world, free from such conventions. Regardless of the actual color of an object in reality, they faithfully reproduced the light as it appeared before their eyes on canvas. What they painted was not the objective appearance of nature but rather the impression of nature as it appeared to them. Therefore, the name “Impressionism” that was later applied to them, although initially pejorative, indeed accurately encapsulated their essence.

The name “Impressionism” itself is widely acknowledged to have originated from Monet’s landscape painting. It was in 1872 when he created “Impression, Sunrise,” which he exhibited at the 1874 “Exhibition of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers,” an independent exhibition organized by young artists including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and Cézanne who were often rejected by the Salon. This exhibition later became known as the seminal “First Impressionist Exhibition,” although the term “Impressionism” had not yet been coined.

Upon seeing Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise,” Louis Leroy, an art critic for “Le Charivari,” wrote a rather lengthy critique titled “Exhibition of Impressionists,” filled from beginning to end with criticism and ridicule of the exhibition. Ironically, it was through this critique, even though it was entirely derogatory, that the name “Impressionism” gained widespread notoriety. Certainly, Leroy, when attaching the name “Impressionism” in his journalistic zeal, could not have foreseen that it would later carry such significant weight, albeit in an entirely different context.