A new copy begun! "Bazille and Camille" by Claude Monet

Here is the painting I am copying: "Bazille and Camille" by Claude Monet:

I chose this painting because (a) I love Monet, and (b) I like the subject matter of figures in the landscape. Monet used his friend Frédéric Bazille and his wife Camille as models for this study for a larger painting called "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe". I started this copy, as I usually do, with a blank white canvas.

Happily, the gallery I am in is not a very busy one - no tour groups came through. I immediately saw what I hadn't noticed when looking at this image on the National Gallery web site: Monet seemed to have done this entire painting over an underpainting of dark browns and dark blue-greens. I decided to do the same.

I did just a little bit of measuring to get the figures roughly the right size and in the right relationship to each other, and then I just started scrubbing in the dark underpainting.

This is how it looked when I stopped for an early lunch - I had only been painting for about an hour, but I was very hungry and tired! Not much stamina today.

After lunch I started putting in some of the greens, adjusted the size and placement of the male figure, made a first pass at the dress, and painted the heads. I also finished the dark underpainting.

I think this is a good start - I'm always happy to just get all the white canvas covered up on the first day. I think I could have gone even darker on my underpainting, and I'll have to darken Camille's dress. A white dress in the shade, with sunlit grass in the background, is darker than you think. I might even finish this one next week!