Camille (The Woman in a Green Dress)

Camille Doncieux (The Woman in the Green Dress)
Artist: Claude Monet

Monet’s early works broke with the academic tradition but still showed the influence of his favorite painters: while the Pave de Chailly echoes the manner of Corot, in the Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur Monet reveals that he had assimilated Boudin's lesson, and in Camille Doncieux (Lady in Green) (Kunsthalle, Bremen) Camille (The Woman in a Green Dress), shown with success at the Salon of 1866, he pays homage to Edouard Manet.
In 1870 war broke out and Monet, who did not want to take part, joined Pissarro in London. Here he saw the works of the English landscape artists and be-came a friend of Paul Durand-Ruel, the gallery owner who was to become his most important agent. His stay inspired some splendid foggy landscapes like The Thames and the Houses of Parliament (1871, National Gallery, London).
On his return to France (1871) he settled at Argenteuil. In those years he assumed an increasingly important role within a group of anti-academic artists close to the Realist current, known as the Batignolles group after their habitual meeting place, the Café Guerbois on rue de Batignolles in Paris. In 1873, under the direction of Monet, they founded the "Societe Anonyme," whose members included Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. In 1874 the society held an exhibition in the studio of the photographer Nadar, and on that occasion Monet showed a view of the harbor of Le Havre whose title, Impression, Sunrise, (Impression, soleil levant), would inspire the name given to the group. A journalist sent to re-view the exhibition took his cue from the painting and sarcastically described the painters as "impressionists ," deriding them as the authors of evanes-cent and incomplete pictures, based on first impressions.