Women in the Garden

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...

Gardens were a favorite subject of impressionist painters. Their rich and fecund images of a blooming, apparently natural world, often engulfing the human figures enclosed within it (fig. 9.1), have in their turn become a source of delight today. The huge modern popularity of impressionist renderings of gardens and other landscapes both derives from and fuels a...

There is a dynamic relationship between depicted light – the light effects represented in Impressionist paintings – and the inherent luminosity of the materials and methods of handling used by the painters. Understanding this relationship is crucial in evaluating the modernity and meanings of Impressionist painting. The physical properties of their chosen materials facilitated...

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised....