DIMENSION
by Paula Bonnell
Something of the original painting is retained in
reproduction, at least the way the weights of the darks
and lights balance against each other. This time
something of the painting’s spell comes with it:
the white dress, the parasol, the leaves on
the southeast tops of two of the small trees, these brights
separate from what’s in front of or behind them
so that the viewer feels the space between
the parasol brilliant with light and
the face it shades. The shadows almost creep
across the grass on which a few petals are
scattered, disregarded (as they edge toward
the northwest) by the shining figure at
the lower left. Two dimensions reverberate
with the illusion of a third, the way the scent
of a flower in soap summons the lilies of
the valley behind the sandbox or the lilacs
which leaned over the shadeloving flowers
clustering beneath them and the redheaded
children forming buildings by overturning buckets
of wet sand.
Without going to the Hermitage
in St. Petersburg or being with Jeanne Marguerite
Lecadre wearing that white dress of 1867, its hem
floating just above the grass, its whites shining
with the genius of Monet’s blues and grays and
the almost caressing fall of the skirt and capelike
top to the pull of gravity, still the eye can reach
and fill with the levity and light
and the favor of it all, and her shadow, too,
weightless, in this calendar page from
an edition of many copies.
Copyright © 2017 by Paula Bonnell.