The association of women and flowers as a metaphor for fertility is at least as old as the Roman goddess Flora. It is not, therefore, surprising that both Monet, Women in the Garden (1866-67), and Van Gogh, La Berceuse (1889), employed this fairly common idea. But a comparison of the manner in which they used this visual trope demonstrates some of the fundamental differences in their approaches to painting. Monet's revolutionary realism did not preclude the use of a classically balanced composition. And his cool, somewhat distant, scientific approach is accompanied by a generalized, classically schematized metaphor. His presentation of the cycle of female fertility has an abstract, intellectualized quality even though, as biographical facts show, the theme may have had important personal associations at the time. Van Gogh's presentation, on the other hand, gives expressive force to the metaphor that matches the degree of feeling he had for the subject of his portrait. Neoimpressionist color theory, his personal connection with the sitter, and his version of the metaphor combine to create a warm, intensely personal picture.
Monet's Women in the Garden is a very large work (8'4" x 6'9") that was intended for the Salon of 1867. It was a second attempt at a monumental work that combined the Impressionist desire to depict the modern world with a display of Monet's radically realistic depiction of sensory data. The earlier work, his Déjeuner sur l'herbe, was immense (15' x 20') but it had not been completed in time for the 1866 Salon and Monet had been forced to abandon it. The Déjeuner, which survives only in a major oil sketch, drawings, and two large fragments, had been conceived by Monet as "a grand summation of the realist tradition [and] a manifesto of the new concerns for contemporaneity and fidelity to nature" which he saw as the modern artist's objectives (Isaacson Monet 15).
Monet's realism was scientific in ori...