Woman in the Garden

Woman in the Garden (Femme au jardin), also called Lady in the Garden at Sainte-Adresse, is an oil on canvas by Claude Monet, generally dated 1867, though some accounts place its start in 1866; it is in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

The sitter is Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre, the young wife of Monet's well-to-do cousin Paul-Eugène Lecadre, and the Monet catalogue raisonné lists the picture as Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden. The Lecadres lived in Le Havre and had a country house, Le Coteau, at nearby Sainte-Adresse, and Monet painted the canvas out of doors in its garden during a short visit. X-ray examination in the Hermitage's conservation studios revealed that he had painted over an earlier picture, including a male figure to the right of the woman.

Compared with Monet's later work, the painting is composed and detailed. Three main elements give it structure: the woman at left, the flowering standard rose rising from a round bed of red flowers at the centre, and the blossoming shrub on the right. Her white dress stands out against the reds, pinks and greens of the garden. The Hermitage scholar Albert Kostenevich observed that the woman is turned away from the viewer because Monet's interest lay in the behaviour of light, and that he painted the lit areas warm and the shadows in a cool, luminous blue, unlike the brown shadows of the old masters. The canvas measures 82 by 101 cm.

Monet exhibited it at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879 under the title The Garden. After completion the picture belonged to the Lecadre family; it later passed through two owners to Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1893, where the Moscow merchant Pyotr Shchukin bought it in 1899. He sold it in 1912 to his brother Sergei Shchukin. Nationalised after the October Revolution, it went to the State Museum of New Western Art and, when that museum was dissolved in 1948, to the Hermitage. A Soviet postage stamp reproduced it in 1973.