# Camille Doncieux
**Camille Doncieux** (Camille-Léonie Doncieux, 1847–1879) was a French artists' model, the first wife of the painter [Claude Monet](https://www.edgepedia.org/claude-monet), and the subject of some 50 of his canvases, including several of the defining works of early [Impressionism](https://www.edgepedia.org/impressionism).[1](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet) • [2](https://www.histoires-de-paris.fr/camille-doncieux/) She posed for Monet from the mid-1860s until her death at thirty-two, and also appeared in paintings by their friends [Édouard Manet](https://www.edgepedia.org/edouard-manet) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.[1](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full name and dates | Camille-Léonie Doncieux, 1847–1879; died at 32 of cancer[2](https://www.histoires-de-paris.fr/camille-doncieux/) • [3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) |
| Marriage | Married Claude Monet in Paris on June 28, 1870, almost three years after the birth of their son Jean (1867)[4](https://publications.artic.edu/node/135551) |
| Children | Two sons: Jean (born 1867) and Michel (born 1878)[4](https://publications.artic.edu/node/135551) • [5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333) |
| Extent as a model | Appears in some 50 canvases by Monet, as well as in works by Manet and Renoir[1](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet) |
| Signature works | *Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress)* (1866), *Women in the Garden* (1866), *Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son* (1875), *La Japonaise* (1876), *Camille on Her Deathbed* (1879)[6](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/camille-claude-monet/2QE-QPkJp0h94g?hl=en) • [3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) • [1](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet) |
| Final image | *Camille on Her Deathbed* (1879), painted at Vétheuil in the year she died[3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) |
## Early life and meeting Monet
Camille Doncieux was born in Lyon in 1847 to a modest family and moved to Paris during her adolescence, at a time when the capital was the center of the European art scene.[2](https://www.histoires-de-paris.fr/camille-doncieux/) Like many young women of limited means, she worked as a painters' model, precarious employment but one of the few that offered financial autonomy to women without fortune.[2](https://www.histoires-de-paris.fr/camille-doncieux/)
She met Claude Monet in Paris in the mid-1860s, when he was still struggling for recognition.[1](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet) The biographer Jackie Wullschläger, author of *Monet: The Restless Vision* (2023), dates the start of the relationship to when Doncieux was 18 and Monet 25, and speculates that a shared interest in theater may have brought them together.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333) Though believed to have come from modest means, Doncieux developed a distinctive sartorial flair that helped Monet engage with the growing interest in modern fashion within the art world.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333)
## The Salon success of 1866
**The green dress.** Early in 1866, with his large *Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe* unfinished and the Salon deadline approaching, Monet painted Doncieux in a few days as a full-length figure portrait: *Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress)*, showing her from behind in a black-and-green striped silk dress and fur-trimmed velvet jacket before a curtain.[6](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/camille-claude-monet/2QE-QPkJp0h94g?hl=en) The format broke with convention, since full-length portraiture had until then been reserved for kings and the aristocracy.[6](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/camille-claude-monet/2QE-QPkJp0h94g?hl=en) The painting met with tremendous acclaim at the Salon of 1866, praised by [Émile Zola](https://www.edgepedia.org/emile-zola) for its fresh style, and some contemporaries attributed it to Édouard Manet, prompting the caricature caption "Monet or Manet?"[6](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/camille-claude-monet/2QE-QPkJp0h94g?hl=en) It was Monet's standout Salon debut.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333)
**Women in the Garden.** In 1866 Monet began *Women in the Garden* (Femmes au jardin), a canvas 255 × 205 cm painted outdoors in the garden of a rented property at Ville-d'Avray, with the canvas lowered into a trench by pulley so he could work on the upper part without changing viewpoint.[7](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/femmes-au-jardin-807) The Musée d'Orsay records that Camille, the artist's companion, posed for the three figures on the left, and that the faces are left vague and cannot be considered portraits.[7](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/femmes-au-jardin-807) Other accounts state that she was the model for all four women in the painting; the museum's own record supports the three-figure count.[8](https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/monet-timeline/lightboxesweb/5-3.php) • [7](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/femmes-au-jardin-807) The 1867 Salon jury refused the finished painting, deploring its visible brushstrokes as carelessness.[7](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/femmes-au-jardin-807)
## Marriage, Argenteuil, and the Impressionist years
Doncieux became pregnant in 1867; Monet's family denied the couple support, and his father advised him to abandon her, forcing Monet to return to [Le Havre](https://www.edgepedia.org/le-havre) while Camille stayed in Paris under friends' care.[8](https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/monet-timeline/lightboxesweb/5-3.php) Their son Jean was born in 1867, and the couple married in Paris on June 28, 1870, almost three years later.[4](https://publications.artic.edu/node/135551) Money problems dogged the relationship both before and after Jean's birth.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333)
After Monet's return from his self-imposed exile in London during the [Franco-Prussian War](https://www.edgepedia.org/franco-prussian-war), the family settled at [Argenteuil](https://www.edgepedia.org/argenteuil) in 1871, opening a new phase in which Camille appeared in scenes of everyday life, often outdoors and with her son.[2](https://www.histoires-de-paris.fr/camille-doncieux/) • [3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) In *Camille Monet (1847–1879) on a Garden Bench* (1873, [Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.edgepedia.org/metropolitan-museum-of-art)), painted the year her father died, she telegraphs sadness while holding a note in her gloved hand; Monet later identified the top-hatted gentleman as a neighbor who had perhaps called to offer condolences.[9](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438003)
**Woman with a Parasol.** The 1875 canvas *Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son* (100 × 81 cm, [National Gallery of Art](https://www.edgepedia.org/national-gallery-of-art), Washington) shows Camille from below against a luminous sky, her green parasol countering her wind-blown dress, with seven-year-old Jean behind her in the tall grass.[3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) Her face is reduced to a few brushstrokes, a veil, a silhouette; Monet paints the instant rather than a likeness, breaking with academic portraiture founded on resemblance and permanence.[3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) Decades later Monet tried to recreate the painting with a stepdaughter from his second marriage, who fainted trying to hold the pose Doncieux had maintained.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333)
**La Japonaise.** In 1876, three years before her death, Monet completed *La Japonaise*, a full-length, vividly colored painting of Camille in a red kimono and blonde wig, now one of the treasures of the [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston](https://www.edgepedia.org/museum-of-fine-arts-boston).[1](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet) The large format, fans, and brilliant color comment on the Parisian vogue for [Japonisme](https://www.edgepedia.org/japonisme).[10](https://th.alphareproduction.com/en/blogs/art-history-artists-movements-and-museums/camille-doncieux-claude-monets-wife-and-muse)
## Vétheuil and death
In 1878, after the collector Ernest Hoschedé's business failed, the Monet and Hoschedé households moved together into a shared house at Vétheuil, pooling resources.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333) There, that same year, Doncieux gave birth to Monet's second son, Michel.[5](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333)
Camille Doncieux died in 1879 at thirty-two, of cancer.[3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) Monet painted her face on her deathbed in *Camille on Her Deathbed* (1879), a final canvas the VMuseum essay describes as haunted by guilt and grief, in which the bed's veils and cool tones gradually absorb the features.[3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html) • [10](https://th.alphareproduction.com/en/blogs/art-history-artists-movements-and-museums/camille-doncieux-claude-monets-wife-and-muse) The clinical psychologist and art historian Mary Mathews Gedo, author of *Monet and His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life* ([University of Chicago Press](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-chicago-press), 2010), argues that Camille fulfilled the function of muse even after her death, as Monet preserved her memory through the gardens he planted at Giverny.[11](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo8725140.html) In 1886 Monet returned to the woman-with-a-parasol motif in two paintings at Giverny, but with anonymous models, Camille having been dead seven years.[3](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html)
## Where her image can be seen
Paintings associated with Camille are dispersed among major collections: *Women in the Garden* at the [Musée d'Orsay](https://www.edgepedia.org/musee-dorsay), Paris; *Woman with a Parasol* at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the 1873 garden-bench painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; *La Japonaise* at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; *The Red Kerchief* at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the green-dress portrait at the Kunsthalle Bremen.[10](https://th.alphareproduction.com/en/blogs/art-history-artists-movements-and-museums/camille-doncieux-claude-monets-wife-and-muse) The Cleveland museum identifies the woman passing behind a French window in *The Red Kerchief* as Camille, and Monet is said to have kept that painting until his death.[12](https://alphareproduction.com/blogs/art-history-artists-movements-and-museums/the-red-capeline-by-monet-portrait-light-and-the-model-s-identity)
Not every woman in a Monet garden scene is Camille. The [National Gallery](https://www.edgepedia.org/national-gallery), London's *Woman Seated on a Bench* (1874) was long thought to show her, but in 1947 Blanche Hoschedé-Monet revealed that the sitter was another model whose name she had forgotten, a claim confirmed by Jean-Pierre Hoschedé and by Camille's son Michel Monet.[13](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-monet-woman-seated-on-a-bench)
## References
1. [Camille Monet, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (lecture page)](https://www.mfa.org/event/robert-j-boardingham-memorial-lecture/camille-monet)
2. [Camille Doncieux : muse de Monet et figure discrète de l'impressionnisme, Histoires de Paris](https://www.histoires-de-paris.fr/camille-doncieux/)
3. [Claude Monet: Woman with a Parasol, Madame Monet and Her Son, VMuseum](https://www.vmuseum.fr/en/artist/monet-en/claude-monet-woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-6761.html)
4. [Cat. 15. The Artist's House at Argenteuil, 1873, Art Institute of Chicago Online Scholarly Catalogues](https://publications.artic.edu/node/135551)
5. [Art Bites: How Women Shaped Monet's Artistic Journey, Artnet News](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-monet-women-muses-2526333)
6. [Camille (1866), Claude Monet, Google Arts & Culture / Kunsthalle Bremen](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/camille-claude-monet/2QE-QPkJp0h94g?hl=en)
7. [Femmes au jardin, Claude Monet, Musée d'Orsay](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/femmes-au-jardin-807)
8. [Monet timeline 1867, National Gallery of Victoria](https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/monet-timeline/lightboxesweb/5-3.php)
9. [Camille Monet (1847–1879) on a Garden Bench, The Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438003)
10. [Camille Doncieux: Life, Children and Monet's Paintings, Alpha Reproduction](https://th.alphareproduction.com/en/blogs/art-history-artists-movements-and-museums/camille-doncieux-claude-monets-wife-and-muse)
11. [Monet and His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life, Mary Mathews Gedo, University of Chicago Press](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo8725140.html)
12. [Monet's Red Capeline: portrait and light, Alpha Reproduction](https://alphareproduction.com/blogs/art-history-artists-movements-and-museums/the-red-capeline-by-monet-portrait-light-and-the-model-s-identity)
13. [Claude Monet, Woman Seated on a Bench, The National Gallery, London](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-monet-woman-seated-on-a-bench)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Visual arts and design › Individual paintings and painting oeuvres*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 19, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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