In the spring of 1866, Claude Monet began work on a large group portrait set in the garden of a house he had rented in Ville d’Avray, southwest of Paris. Two years later, Émile Zola described Women in the Garden (cat. 45), which had meanwhile been rejected by the Salon, as one of the young painter’s most characteristic works...

The ground for this style had been prepared three decades earlier by the artists of the Barbizon School, who left their studios for the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris...