Claude Monet, Camille at the Window, Argenteuil

We're in the Mellon Galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and we're standing in front of a lovely painting by Claude Monet. This is Camille at the Window, Argenteuil, and the date 1873 is meaningful because we're one year before the first Impressionist exhibition. So we're in the beginnings of that movement and these artists who will get together and exhibit on their own. Argenteuil is this evolving suburb. On the one hand, it's very rural and agricultural, that's its historic past. On the other hand, it's rapidly becoming very industrial. Argenteuil also became an opportunity for him to become interested in gardening, and we'll see that come to fruition in his later works, The Maid in Giverny. But what we're looking at is his wife Camille. She's standing at the window of their house, looking out on the garden, and we see a riot of flowers in front of her, including several plants in porcelain pots that Monet would have cultivated inside the house during the winter, and which he has now just brought outside. It's the beginning of spring, everything is in bloom, weather is warming up. It's such an interesting painting because it's not a landscape, it's not a portrait of his wife, it's a painting of his wife inside, but looking out toward the garden. And so it really exists like the nexus of several genres. We know it's Camille, but her face is rendered very loosely, so we don't really see any of the defining features. So it's certainly not a portrait. But at the same time, it's rendered very lovingly. Camille and Monet had been in a relationship for some time, but they finally get married in 1870. It feels to me like an expression of Monet's love for his wife, even though we don't see the particularities of her face. The way that she's framed draws our eye to her. And there's a slight tilt in her head that is also very sweet. The flowers and the garden bed create the barrier separating us. One of the shutters is slightly ajar, could be shut at any time. So she's kept at some distance from us, but the garland that the gardens and flowers form creates. A natural frame around her in addition to the architecture of the house. In a way, she's protected, right? She's in a protected space as someone that he cares for and loves. And then you also get, at the same time, the love of the flowers, of the garden. It feels filled to me with pleasure. Everything is rendered very loosely, quick dots and dashes of paint. The flowers are touches of paint. The leaves are slightly larger touches of paint. The petals have some impasto, some thickness to them, especially toward the center. So it draws our eye toward Camille. And then areas where the paint is brushed on more thinly, in the windows, we see blues and oranges. We can almost imagine the paint peeling off of the shutters, this thinly applied layer of blue paint at the top. The top is revealing the red underneath. It feels like this domestic nuclear family, beautiful garden, happy home. Yes, and if you look closely in the background, you can see what is possibly a mirror or a clock. It's hard to tell in the background. And then this very loosely articulated rectangle here, and it's hard to know what that is. Is it a shelf? Is it a painting on the wall that was unfinished? Many layers of framing and framed objects within the canvas. There's this city-suburb dichotomy that's happening for Monet as he's got his studio in Paris that he's commuting to. Trains are relatively recent. Then he goes home to his wife in the suburbs. We may not see a train station here or the boulevards of Paris, but we are still seeing. modern life. It's the train that really makes his move to Argenteuil possible, so that he can remain part of the art scene in Paris, part of the burgeoning Impressionist group, and also really devoted to landscape and nature. It allows him to have the best of both worlds. It's so interesting because Camille sits for so many works, from when they first meet, she's a model, and then they have a relationship, they get married, and we even have a lovely painting of Camille on her deathbed. It's touching to see his image of her. She is certainly his most important model during this period in particular, but throughout his whole career. After her death, he really paints almost no figure paintings. So she is the center of the composition, and she's certainly a very important figure to Monet.