Madame Monet wearing a kimono

Madame Monet in a Kimono, better known as La Japonaise, is a full-length oil on canvas portrait of Camille Monet painted by Claude Monet in 1876; it has been in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 1956.

In the mid-1870s Monet was again short of money: Durand-Ruel's support had dwindled and a move to a new house had added to his expenses. Japonisme was fashionable in Paris, and Monet painted his wife in a borrowed, heavily embroidered red uchikake, standing on a tatami mat before a wall hung with Japanese fans, hoping to sell the large canvas, 231.8 by 142.3 cm, at a good price. Camille, who had dark hair, wears a blonde wig, stressing that the picture shows a European woman performing a Japanese role. She turns her head towards the viewer and raises a folding fan in the colours of the French flag, while a fierce samurai embroidered on the robe sits near the centre of the composition. Manet's Lady with Fans of 1873 may have been a model Monet wanted to rival.

Monet sent the painting to the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, where it was shown alongside a large group of his canvases, among them Woman with a Parasol. Zola and Alexandre Pothey praised its colour and daring, but other critics found it bizarre and sexually suggestive. Monet claimed it had sold to a buyer for 2,020 francs, a price many historians doubt. In 1918 he told the dealers Georges Bernheim and René Gimpel that Camille had been the model and dismissed the work as a piece of rubbish painted to please the market.

The picture sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1877 to Constantin de Rasty, passed through Paul Rosenberg, Philip Lehman and Duveen Brothers, and was bought by the MFA in 1956 for $45,000. In 2015 the museum's 'Kimono Wednesdays' events, in which visitors could try on a replica of the robe, drew protests, and the museum stopped letting visitors wear the robe.