Unlike Rossetti’s Elizabeth Siddal, Rodin’s Camille Claudel, Salvador Dalí’s Gala, and Pollock’s Lee Krasner, almost nothing is known about Monet’s model, mistress, muse, and first wife, Camille. Monet’s second wife, Alice Hoschedé, with whom he had had a scandalous premarital liaison, destroyed “every memento attesting not only to Camille’s role in his life but to her very existence.” Since we know nothing of Camille’s character, Monet and His Muse is not about Camille herself but about the sequence of pictures she appeared in.
When Camille became pregnant, Monet naturally feared that she had tried to trick him into marriage. Mary Matthews Gedo condemns him for leaving Camille “in Paris, pregnant and penniless, while he retreated to the comforts” of his family home in Normandy. But at a time when men frequently abandoned their inconvenient mistresses, Monet behaved honorably and remained loyal to Camille: he recognized their son and supported her as best he could despite his father’s disapproval and his own extreme poverty. Gedo is also extremely critical of Alice, whom she calls controlling, ghoulish, and insanely jealous of Camille. She exaggerates the importance of Camille, whom Monet described as “very nice, a very sweet child,” by absurdly calling her “a full-fledged artistic partner,” whose ability to pose was almost as important as Monet’s artistic genius. But most painters then, as now, used their mistresses and wives as models. They were readily available, free of charge, and unlikely to refuse the master’s requests.
When Camille became pregnant, Monet naturally feared that she had tried to trick him into marriage.
Monet did not paint mythological pictures, but Gedo, in order to elevate Camille’s status, fancifully describes her as Flora, Ariadne, Primavera, and Venus. Botticelli’s nude Venus, however, has long blond tresses, covers her nakedness with her hands and stands on a shell at the edge of the sea, attended by zephyrs and a handmaiden. By contrast, in Camille and Jean Monet in the Garden, Monet’s dark-haired wife is fully dressed, has her hair pinned up, and her hands raised above her head. Firmly on land, she’s in a garden, surrounded by flowers, with her child in the foreground. The two paintings are different in every detail. Gedo similarly misinterprets the portrait of Camille in a red kimono, La Japonaise, as the mistress of a “captive samurai.” The image on the kimono is not an idealized feudal warrior, but a misshapen and monstrous guardian-demon with a prognathous jaw, squashed nose, bulging eyes, stunted left limb, and prehensile fingers. Monet’s other portrayals of Camille as a courtesan and prostitute also undermine Gedo’s idealized view.
Though Camille appears in her only surviving photograph as an attractive woman with a fine-boned face, Monet painted her in his ambitious Luncheon on the Grass with a low forehead, shadowy eyes, puffy cheeks, a huge chin, and a stupefied expression. He both revealed and concealed her identity by changing and then effacing her distinctive features—a serious weakness in his work. In pictures of Camille on the beach, she merges, almost melts, into the wind, sand, and sea. Gedo notes that in all Monet’s paintings Camille remains aloof, even alienated, from their son and has no physical or emotional contact with him. But she fails to explain this recurrent theme. Monet blurred Camille’s features and separated her from her son in order to diminish—not exalt—her character and strengthen his own emotional claim to their problematic child.
Gedo is more ingenious than accurate and her critical method is as weak as her biographical approach. Her fanciful interpretations are not based on hard facts, solid proof, or what actually appears in the paintings. Reductive psychoanalytic assertions—Monet’s liaison with the married Alice “reverberates with overtones of unresolved oedipal rivalries”—tells us, precisely, nothing. There’s a lot of smug and presumptuous speculation when “suggests” suddenly jumps to “no doubt.” Gedo’s grasp of art history is also shaky where she states that Raphael, rather than Giorgione and Titian, provided the model for Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.
Many other interpretations are far-fetched and float above the pictures like a cloud of unknowing. Gedo claims, without evidence, that when Camille posed for three different figures in Women in the Garden, the first stands for her “determination and resolve,” the second for her “seductive powers,” and the third for her “active collaboration”—though models are by definition passive. Monet’s “paintings of water refer on some deeply unconscious level [which only Gedo can perceive] to the loss of his mother.” The solid woman in black in The Luncheon, “one might say,” is an apparition, but she is also a woman in mourning who symbolizes Monet’s dead mother. (A much more convincing cloudy apparition appears reflected in the purplish haze of Water Lilies [1907].) Similarly, the black sash on little Jean Monet is “premonitory of the family’s impending mourning” for Camille’s father—who was still alive at the time. Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden “symbolized Monet’s unspoken (and perhaps unconscious) conviction that ‘Camille rightly belongs here: Jeanne-Marguerite is merely a simulacrum who has displaced her.’” Gladioli, “which portrays Camille as a distant figure, standing in a grassy area,” suggests the cancerous symptoms that “interfered with normal sexual relations between the couple.” Even something as palpable and joyous as Monet’s lush gardens at Giverny, with their floating lily ponds and delicate Japanese footbridge, is called “his own symbolic tomb, as well as that of his beloved dead women—his mother, Aunt Lecadre, Camille, and eventually Alice.” Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Two realistic pictures illuminate the darker aspects of Monet’s relations with Camille and contradict Gedo’s thesis.
Two realistic pictures illuminate the darker aspects of Monet’s relations with Camille and contradict Gedo’s thesis. An uncharacteristically claustrophobic, anguished painting, in striking contrast to his oxygenated plein air work, suggests the stressful atmosphere of their life. In The Red Cape, Portrait of Madame Monet (1873), framed by the wispy curtains and stark windows of a barren interior, she stands outdoors, isolated in the snow. Protectively clutching the blood-red cape that covers her fur-trimmed dark jacket and skirt, she looks wistfully into the house that forcefully excludes her. Monet wrote that he felt guilty about studying “the proportions of light and shade in the colors that death had imposed on Camille’s immobile face,” but overcame his grief by portraying her corpse in Camille Monet on Her Deathbed (1879).
After Camille’s death, human subjects virtually disappeared from Monet’s paintings and natural forces gained symbolic intensity. One might argue that in the pictures of Ice Floes, completed during the harsh winter following Camille’s death in 1879, the frozen river, the surging floods, and crashing blocks of ice suggest not only his grief but also the liberating emotional breakthrough with Alice that followed Camille’s death.
