Focus on La Japonaise (painting) and discuss the Motivation.
Money became one of Monet's biggest troubles in the 1860s. His father had cut his allowance due to Monet's rebellious decision to create works unsuitable for the state-sponsored Salon exhibitions. Although Monet's financial condition improved in the early 1870s after his works were recognized and regularly purchased by art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, this support began to erode due to Durand-Ruel's difficulty in selling them; due to the loss of this important source of income and the expenses Monet faced in moving into a new house, beginning in 1874, he began to fall back into financial difficulty.
In desperate need of money, Monet created this painting of his wife in a red kimono that he borrowed from a friend, and sent the painting to Durand-Ruel's gallery in the second Impressionism exhibition of 1876, along with 18 other paintings, including the famous Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son. Given the popularity of Japonisme in France at this time, Monet hoped to sell La Japonaise at a high price to ease his financial difficulties.
Forty years later, in 1918, when the art dealers Georges Bernheim and René Gimpel visited Monet and informed him that La Japonaise had sold for a very decent price, Monet was said to stated that he was ashamed by the fact of having painted the work simply to please the market, calling it "a piece of filth". Some scholars believe that he may have been more committed to this subject than these comments would suggest; when the work was in progress, Monet wrote to Philippe Burty, a famous art critic and collector of Japanese artworks, commenting that it was "superb" to paint the heavily detailed kimono. Other scholars argue that this letter may have been an "advertisement" instead of Monet's true words, and motivated by a desire to influence notable critics who held an interest in Japonisme such as Burty.Another possible motivation for the creation of this painting is that Monet wished to "compete" with his friend Édouard Manet's work The Lady with the Fans, modeled by Nina de Callias in 1873. There is no solid evidence that Monet had seen this work in person before he painted the La Japonaise, but he seemed to know of it from an engraving of Manet's sketch of the work, published in the book Revue du monde nouveau in February 1874. A 1876 review in the journal Le Soleil even described Monet's works as "following suit".
Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son Impressionism Japonisme Nina de Callias fr Paul Durand-Ruel Édouard Manet Philippe Burty kimono René Gimpel