Claude Monet – Woman with a Parasol, 1875 | Giclée Print

Camille Monet stands on a hillside at Argenteuil with a green parasol against a fast, windy sky; her son Jean is behind her in the grass. Monet painted it outdoors and quickly — the canvas shows through the sky in places, because he did not go back to fill it.

It was painted to be seen at speed. The National Gallery's own description is blunt about the method: the sky is sketched in chaotic strokes of blue and grey with bare canvas left exposed; the grass is denser, in short strokes of green, blue and brown; the buttercups are dabs of yellow, and that yellow comes back on Camille's sleeve. Stand close and it is a field of separate marks. Step back and the wind moves.

Where it hung first. Monet showed it in Paris in 1876 at the second Impressionist exhibition, as no. 161, under the title Promenade. It went from the artist the same year to Dr Georges de Bellio, the homeopath who bought from the Impressionists when almost no one else did.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the National Gallery of Art's own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a nineteenth-century painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 81 × 100 cm / 31.9 × 39.4 in — oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.41× original. Image 33.60 × 41.64 cm.
60 × 80 cm / 23.6 × 31.5 in — reduced, 0.62× original. Image 50.40 × 62.47 cm.

On the borders. The canvas is proportionally narrower than our sheets, so the white border is wider above and below than at the sides — on the large sheet 8.2 cm at the top against 4.8 at the sides. The alternative would be to run the picture nearly to the edge, and a sheet with no room around it looks like a mistake in a frame.

Provenance
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875. Signed lower right: Claude Monet 75.
Oil on canvas; 100 × 81 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, acc. no. 1983.1.29.
From the artist in 1876 to Dr Georges de Bellio, Paris; by inheritance to M. and Mme Ernest Donop de Monchy, Paris; Georges Menier, Paris, by 1924; Menier sale, Palais Galliera, 15 June 1965, no. 121; bought by Hector Brame for Paul Mellon; given to the National Gallery in 1983.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under its Open Access policy.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.