Description
Woman with a Parasol Looking Left was painted during a rather unusual period in Claude Monet 's career.
In the two open-air studies, Woman with a Parasol Looking Left and Woman with a Parasol Looking Right, Monet was fascinated by the observer positioned far below where the sitter is shown; she stands on the bank of a river against a background of pale blue sky. The young woman in both paintings is Suzanne Hoschedé, one of the daughters of Alice Hoschedé, who would become Monet's second wife in 1889. Her future stepdaughter Suzanne would long be one of the painter's favorite models.
Woman with a Parasol Looking Left was painted outdoors, probably in a single session lasting several hours. The artist intended the work to convey the feeling of an informal family outing rather than a formal portrait, using the pose and location to suggest that his wife and son interrupted their walk while he captured their portraits. The brevity of the moment portrayed here is conveyed by a repertoire of lively brushstrokes of vibrant color, hallmarks of the style in which Monet was instrumental. Bright sunlight shines behind Camille to whiten the top of her parasol and the flowing fabric on her back, while colorful reflections from the wildflowers below touch her forehead with yellow.
Although the woman is clearly the subject of this painting, she is paradoxically veiled. The title, for example, does not give us any information about it. There is no story, no background, no trace of character with which to contextualize the image on the canvas. The woman's face is a mere blur, with no really discernible features or expression. Her complete anonymity is all the more strange considering that Monet loved her: at the time, he was living with Alice Hoschedé, who later became his second wife, and the model for this painting was their daughter Suzanne, who was then 18 years.
She is further depersonalized by the way she perfectly complements the landscape. Her dress, in concert with the bent soles at her feet, indicates the direction of the wind; she is also attuned to the movement of the clouds in the background. The play of light and shadow created by the parasol (beautifully rendered by Monet) primarily serves as an exposure of soft, flexible sunlight that illuminates the scene.
Although something of an aberration in terms of his career, Monet's later isolated detour towards figure painting, and especially this painting in particular, shows the artist's growing preoccupation with formal values, that is, questions of composition, balance , harmony and color above other concerns.
After a few paintings in the 1860s, Monet almost completely dispensed with figures in his works, devoting himself instead to landscape painting. However, when he included large figures in his landscape paintings, as he began to do again in the 1880s, he treated them as though they were an element of the landscape. Around the mid-1880s, Monet returned to the beginning of his career as an artist and returned to figure painting.