Dans la prairie

Dans la prairie (In the Meadow) is among a group of outdoor figure paintings Monet made in the mid-1870s, when he was trying to reconcile the Impressionist ambition for plein-air naturalism with the Salon's demand for finished figure work. He used members of his own circle — here two female figures recline in a sun-drenched meadow — and the result sits between portrait and landscape, neither fully resolving the tension. The dappled light dissolving human form into its surroundings anticipates his own later figure paintings and Renoir's parallel experiments with outdoor figure technique.

Figures are treated with the same broken-colour approach as the surrounding grass, their forms losing hard contour in the sunlight. Monet uses high-key greens and yellows for the meadow, with pink and white patches for the women's clothing. The handling is loose throughout, refusing to give faces or details more resolution than the grass around them.