Standing before the couple's rented house in Argenteuil, a short distance by train from Paris, Camille Monet (1847–1879) is little more than an accessory to a splendid mass of hollyhocks. Monet's love of gardening, fully expressed in later life at his house and ponds at Giverny, became evident wherever the artist put down his roots. In summer 1874 he had rented the house shown here before construction was completed; hollyhocks planted at the end of that summer would not bloom in force until June or July 1876. This painting and related canvases thus commemorate the garden's first full flowering. Historians have determined that in front of his modest house, painted pink with green shutters, Monet installed a large central flower bed circled by a path. Gladioli, more hollyhocks, and underplantings of nasturtiums and geraniums filled the interstices of the rectangular plot.

This audacious canvas displays the Impressionist technique that Monet had only recently perfected. In contrast to the fluid, Corot-like brushwork of his early pictures made at Argenteuil, here the paint is applied in dabs and licks, the entire surface animated by flickering light and bright local color. It was precisely this technique that Seurat systematized into pointillism.