Woman with a Parasol - Julian de Medeiros
Woman with a Parasol, by Claude Monet (1875)
Every artist chases an impossible dream.
Monet’s dream was to paint light and color as they appeared to him in nature, always moving, never fixed. This was his impossible dream, to capture the ever-shifting quality of natural light, or the ‘envelope’, an artistic principle which would become known as “impressionism.”
In pursuit of this dream, Monet never stopped painting outdoors, often returning to the same place over and over again. “Many people think I paint easily, but it is not an easy thing to be an artist, he told a journalist. “I often suffer tortures when I paint. It is a great joy and a great suffering.”
And yet for all his troubles, Monet managed to paint scenes of boundless beauty, such as the painting above: Woman with a Parasol (1875).
What makes this such a stunning painting is that it is more than just a pretty picture of a woman holding a parasol. As the French art critic Gustave Geffory once wrote, Monet manages to depict a space “where there blossom without ceasing the phenomena that last both an instant and an eternity.” Or what he called ‘the dream of infinity.
In 1895, twenty years after completing the painting he wrote to Alice (depicted above), “I am chasing a dream. I want the impossible.” In pursuit of this dream Monet was never satisfied, and it is estimated that he destroyed nearly 500 of his own paintings.
As his friend the former statesman Georges Clemenceau wrote: “One must suffer. One must not be satisfied. (…) With a painter who slashes his canvases, who weeps, who explodes with rage in front of his painting, there is hope.”
This is Monet’s impossible dream. But what a beautiful dream it is.
To learn more about Monet, I recommend reading Ross King’s ‘Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lillies.”
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