Madame Monet Embroidering
Claude Monet
CLAUDE MONET, 1875. OIL ON CANVAS.
For a brief moment, the beauty of domesticity was greater than that of nature. Monet mostly painted outside, bringing his canvas out for long days in the fresh air, working en plein air to capture waterlilies, sunsets, rivers, and fields. The great father of modernism, and the creator of the painting for which Impressionism took its name, wanted to capture the world not as it necessarily was, but as he saw it. Here, however, he brought his easel and brushes inside, and painted this delicate, beautiful work of his wife quietly absorbed in her embroidery loom. Light remains a focus, it ebbs through the large windows and dances off her dress and her face. There is such tenderness in every brush stroke, the whole painting seems to exude a powerful, understated romance. It is not wild with passion or energy, nor is it attempting at objectivity. Instead it is a quiet ode to love and marriage, and to the beauty of co-habitation as Monet saw it.