So why was Monet able to succeed in his next painting, Femmes au Jardin (1866), when he had failed with Déjeuner sur l’herbe? For Femmes au Jardin, he downsized to a more modest canvas size of 8½ by 7 feet, and reduced the number of figures to four from twelve in Déjeuner. Perhaps most importantly, Femmes au Jardin was painted outside. Working in Ville d’Avray during the summer of 1866, Monet described his success with plein air painting in Femmes au Jardin when he said, “This picture I painted completely on the spot and after nature, without retouching it afterwards.” (qtd. Champa, 11). Although this is not actually true, as Monet finished the painting in a studio on the coast that winter, Monet’s claim reflects his desire to paint the majority of the painting outdoors, where not only the subjects of his painting but he himself could be “one” with nature. In order to work outside as much as possible, Monet went to great lengths claiming, “I dug a trench in the ground, a sort of pit, to lower the canvas progressively in order to get at the top” (qtd. Champa, 10). 
Whether Monet actually did devise a pulley-system to lower his canvas into this pit is unknown, but his expression of this idea demonstrates his desire to paint en plein air at any cost. Unable to work in the studio, Monet brought the studio to the outdoors, and was able to finish the painting, with Courbet’s suggestions. The older artist came to visit, and as Monet reminisced:
One day he [Courbet] asked me “Why aren’t you working my young friend.” I answered him: you can see that there’s no sunlight. That meant nothing to him since he thought you could always work on the landscape sections. [But] there was a bit of a smile when he said this, and it is possible he was just speaking in irony” (qtd. Champa, 10).
The “irony” Monet noted suggests Courbet knew Monet’s true passion lay in the landscape, and thus understood that, on a cloudy day, Monet would sooner work on the women than the garden. Monet’s opposition to working on the landscape sections without sunlight demonstrates his desire to achieve unity within his painting, which required every element of the painting to be completed under the same atmospheric circumstances, allotted the landscape the same amount of importance as the women, for whom the primary model was again his mistress, Camille, in his “figure” painting.
Indeed, in Femmes au Jardin, the garden could be said to be more important to Monet than the women. As in Déjeuner, the tree is in the center of the painting. Its central position, and the direct sunlight drawing attention to the natural atmosphere, indicates Monet has subtly started to concentrate on nature, rather than the women who are the supposed subjects. The white flowers directly behind the tree also call attention to it. The tree’s position not only indicates its importance, but its size does as well: it is larger with respect to the figures. Compared to the Déjeuner, the tree is closer to the foreground, giving it a more emphasized position in the painting. Moreover, rather than forming a “carpet” underneath the tree, the women form a circle around it, emphasized by the motion of the red-haired woman’s dress as it flows backwards, and the bustle of the woman on the right. As Monet used Camille for three of the figures, this gives them all a similar appearance, indicating that individual characteristics of figures are not important, whereas Monet felt every small bit of nature was important.
Image: Monet, Claude. Femmes au Jardin, 1866. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Scanned from: Wildenstein, Daniel. Monet: Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. 2. Köln, Germany: Taschen, 1994. 4 vols.