Camille Monet (1847–1879) on a Garden Bench

Camille Doncieux was the first wife of French painter Claude Monet. She modeled for her husband on several occasions, including for the painting Camille, "The Woman in the Green... Dress". In addition to being Monet's favoured model, she also modelled for Pierre-August Renoir and Édouard Manet. Camille and Monet were married in 1870. She became ill in 1875. They had two sons; Jean was born in 1867, Michel was born in 1878. This second child weakened her already fading health. She died, probably of pelvic cancer on 5 September 1879; Monet painted her on her death bed.
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Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to... prominence during the 1870s and 1880s in spite of harsh opposition from the art community in France. The name of the style is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant , which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities ; common, ordinary subject matter; the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience; and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.
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