Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son

Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, also known as The Stroll (La Promenade), is an oil on canvas painted by Claude Monet in 1875 at Argenteuil; it is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Monet lived at Argenteuil from 1871 to 1877. In the summers of 1875 and 1876 he painted a series of pictures of the garden of his second house there and of the poppy fields near Colombes and Gennevilliers, in which the human figure, little used in his work of the preceding years, took on new importance. His wife Camille Doncieux was his constant model, and here she stands on a rise with their son Jean, then nearly eight, further back and visible only from the waist up.

This is a family scene rather than a formal portrait. Seen from below, with a low horizon, Camille is silhouetted against white clouds and blue sky; the wind lifts her veil and her white dress, and the green underside of her parasol echoes the grass. The work was painted outdoors and quickly, probably in a single session. Monet laid in the sky first with rapid strokes in many directions, leaving bands of the ground visible, and retouched it after adding the two figures. At 100 by 81 cm it is the largest canvas he painted in the 1870s, and it is signed and dated 'Claude Monet 75' at lower right.

It was one of 18 works by Monet at the second Impressionist exhibition, held at Durand-Ruel's gallery in April 1876, where it drew little but favourable comment. Monet sold it that November to Georges de Bellio; it later belonged to Georges Menier and was bought at the Menier sale in 1965 for Paul Mellon, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1983. Monet returned to the motif in 1886 with two Giverny paintings now in the Musée d'Orsay.