Madame Monet wearing a kimono

Monet painted his wife Camille dressed in a Japanese kimono in 1876, the same year Japanese decorative arts were creating a sensation at Paris's Exposition Universelle. The work — Camille positioned against a backdrop of Japanese fans pinned to the wall — is his most explicit response to the Japonisme craze that swept the French avant-garde. Unlike his more organic absorption of Japanese compositional strategies, this canvas is theatrical, almost ironically so: a French woman in costume, the Japanese elements deployed as props rather than formal principles. Monet himself later disparaged it as too commercial, preferring to be remembered for his formal innovations rather than this crowd-pleasing orientalism.

The embroidered kimono is rendered with unusual attention to decorative detail, the dragon motif picked out in reds and golds against the robe's turquoise ground. Monet applies thick, impastoed strokes for the embroidery, contrasting with lighter, sweeping brushwork in the fans on the wall and the straw mat underfoot.