Camille Monet (1847–1879) in the Garden at Argenteuil

Painted in 1876 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this portrait of Camille Monet—the artist's first wife—in their garden at Argenteuil captures her during the brief idyllic period of the family's life in that riverside town. Argenteuil was Monet's base from 1872 to 1878, and many of his most celebrated Impressionist paintings were made there. Camille, who died of tuberculosis in 1879, appears here as a graceful figure in the summer garden, the atmospheric outdoor light dissolved into the impressionist broken-stroke technique that distinguishes this from conventional portraiture.

Monet renders Camille against the garden's summer abundance through rapid, varied brushwork that captures the flickering of light through foliage. The figure is painted with the same broken-touch technique used for the surrounding vegetation, integrating person and natural environment in a purely optical fusion rather than maintaining the conventional portrait's hierarchical distinction between figure and background.