Description
| Year of creation: | 1886 |
| Original size: | 88 cm x 131 cm |
| Paint style: | Impressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Musée d’Orsay, Paris |
Woman with a Parasol (Facing Left) is a hand-painted oil reproduction of Monet’s 1886 work: a figure with a green parasol stands on a flowering slope, and the face has been left without features.
Woman with a Parasol (Facing Left), 1886 – Claude Monet
What is on the canvas
The canvas stands upright and tall. The figure is on a grassy slope, painted from below, so
that almost nothing but sky remains behind her. She faces left; the body stands slightly in
profile and the parasol is held above the head and a little back, the arm crossed in front of
the chest. The parasol is green, its ribs visible and its edge pale. She wears a white-cream
bodice with three-quarter sleeves and a long skirt passing from pale pink into white; at the
chest sits a tiny red accent, the only pure red in the work. A dark blue-grey head covering
sits above, with a veil streaming left behind it. The face has been left without
features — under the parasol there is only a pale shape, no eyes, nose or mouth. In
the foreground a meadow rises, painted in short dabs of yellow, orange, pink, violet, green and
blue.
An empty face and a meadow of colour
It is precisely the absence of the face that separates this work from Monet’s other figures.
With no features, the eye does not settle on a portrait but slides on to the skirt, the parasol
and the grass — the figure becomes a shape in light rather than a person. The meadow is the
opposite of that emptiness: laid in dense short strokes that almost nowhere close into a
surface, so the colours stay separate and mix only in the eye. This oil on canvas reproduction
therefore carries two different ways of painting on one canvas — soft above, broken below.
The motif in Monet’s work
The same arrangement, mirrored and with a child behind, is
Woman with a Parasol.
The group version of the garden motif is offered by
Women in the Garden, while
Camille Monet on Her Deathbed
is a rare instance of a figure indoors. How far Monet took the broken stroke in landscape is
shown by Impression, Sunrise.
Museum and record
The original is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris under accession number
RF 2621. The museum record lists it as oil on canvas measuring 88 x 131 cm and
gives the year as 1886. The title we use is the title in that record.
How it behaves on a wall
The markedly upright format, close to 2 : 3, grows in height and fills a narrow wall between
a door and a window well. Because the upper half is light and quiet while the lower is busy, it
reads better hung a little high, so the meadow does not fall at furniture height. 40 x 60 cm and
50 x 75 cm suit a hallway. 60 x 90 cm and 70 x 100 cm are usual above a chest of drawers.
88 x 131 cm is exactly the size of the original and is therefore the most
faithful choice. 80 x 120 cm, 100 x 150 cm and 120 x 180 cm are for tall walls and stairwells.
As wall decor this motif brings light into a room without strong contrast.
Hand-painted, not a print
This hand-painted canvas art is made with a brush rather than a printer. A print lays colour
in an evenly thin film: every dab in the meadow comes out the same thickness and the meadow
becomes a pattern. Applied by hand each dab differs — some stand above the weave, others are
barely drawn — so light breaks across them unequally and the meadow comes alive as you move
through the room. With this motif the difference is at its greatest, because the lower third is
built from hundreds of such strokes. A museum-quality reproduction means keeping that
irregularity rather than smoothing it away.
Custom sizes, frame, ordering and lead time
If none of the eight sizes fits, we paint to the size you set, keeping the ratio of the sides
so the figure is not squeezed. A 3D application is available for the frame — it is for
frame selection only and does not place the work in your room; the separate
visualisation service does that. The lead time is 15 to 45 days, because the
work is painted to order, and before dispatch we send you a photograph of the finished piece
for approval. Among famous paintings on canvas this one is unusually quiet. Further reproductions on canvas are in the
Claude Monet gallery.
- Subject: figure with a green parasol on a flowering slope, facing left, the face without features.
- Technique: oil on canvas; soft handling above, a meadow of hundreds of separate dabs below.
- Sizes: upright format, eight sizes from 40 x 60 cm to 120 x 180 cm; 88 x 131 cm is the size of the original.
- Worth knowing: the face was deliberately left blank — the only pure red is a small flower at the chest.
