Claude Monet
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born November 14, 1840, Paris, France
died December 5, 1926, Giverny
in full Oscar-Claude Monet French painter who was the initiator,
leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his
mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated
studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the
light or as his interest shifted. These series were frequently
exhibited in groups—for example, his images of haystacks (1891) and
the Rouen Cathedral (1894). At his home in Giverny, Monet created
the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his last series
of paintings. His popularity soared in the second half of the 20th
century, when his works traveled the world in museum exhibitions
that attracted record-breaking crowds and marketed popular
commercial items featuring imagery from his art.
Childhood and early works
When Claude, the eldest son of Adolphe Monet, a grocer, was five
years old, the family moved to the Normandy coast,near Le Havre,
where his father took over the management ofhis family's thriving
ship-chandlering and grocery business. This event has more than
biographical significance, for it was Monet's childhood, spent along
the beaches, and the intimate knowledge he gained of the sea and the
rapidly shifting Norman weather, that would one day give rise to his
fresh vision of nature. Monet's first success as an artist came when
he was 15, with the sale of caricatures that were carefully observed
and well drawn. In these early years he also executed pencil
sketches of sailing ships, which were almost technical in their
clear descriptiveness. His aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, was an
amateur painter, and, perhaps at her suggestion, Claude went to
study drawing with a localartist. But his life as a painter did not
begin until he was befriended by Eugène Boudin, who introduced the
somewhatarrogant student to the practice—then uncommon—of painting
in the open air. The experience set the direction for Monet, who for
more than 60 years would concentrate on visible phenomena and on the
innovation of effective methods to transform perception into
pigment.
Although oil landscapes had been painted at least since the 16th
century, they usually were produced in the studio—recollections,
rather than direct impressions, of observations of nature. The
English painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner made small oil
sketches out-of-doors before 1810, but it is unlikely that Monet
knew these studies. He first visited Paris in 1859–60, where he was
impressed by the work of the Barbizon-school painters Charles
Daubigny and Constant Troyon. To his family's annoyance, he refused
to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts. Instead, he frequented the
haunts of advanced artists and worked at the Académie Suisse, where
he met Camille Pissarro. This informal training was interrupted by a
call to military service; he served from 1861 to 1862 in Algeria,
where he was excited by the African light and colour. Monet's choice
of Algeria for service was perhaps a result ofhis admiration for the
Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose colouristic work had been
influenced by a visit to Morocco in 1832.
In 1862 Monet returned to Le Havre, perhaps because of illness, and
again painted the sea with Boudin, while also meeting the Dutch
marine painter Johan Barthold Jongkind. Later that year he continued
to study in Paris, this time with the academician Charles Gleyre, in
whose atelier he met the artists Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley,
and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. After disagreements with their master,
the group departed for the village of Chailly-en-Bière, near
Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau. It was also during this
period—orat least before 1872—that Monet discovered Japanese prints,
the decorativeness and flatness of which were to have a strong
influence on the development of modern painting in France.
The exceptional achievements of Monet's prolific youthful period can
be measured in works completed between 1865 and 1870, before he had
begun to fragment his brushstrokes into the characteristic broken
touches that were to become the hallmark of Impressionist style. One
of the most ambitious of these early works (which was never
finished, supposedly because of negative comments by Gustave Courbet)
was Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1865–66; “Luncheon on the Grass”), named
after Édouard Manet's notorious paintingshown in the Salon des
Refusés in 1863. In contrast to Manet's masterpiece, which was a
shocking adaptation of a Renaissance visual idea to a contemporary
setting, Monet'spainting, about 15 feet high by 20 feet wide, was an
utterly contemporary, yet unprovocative representation of a group of
fashionably dressed picnickers in the forest of Fontainebleau. Monet
did share with Manet, however, a concern for representing actual
scenes of modern life rather than contrived historical, romantic, or
fanciful subjects. Thus,Monet's Déjeuner was an extension, by virtue
of a more immediate empiricism, of the Realism of Courbet.
Impressionism, broadly viewed, was a celebration of the pleasures of
middle-class life; indeed, Monet's subject matter from this period
often involved domestic scenes featuring his wife, son, and garden.
Yet, painting la viemoderne (“modern life”) was not to be the
primary aim of Monet's art. Of more significance in his case was his
ceaseless search for painterly means to implement his radical view
of nature. More so than his ambitious figure paintings, such works
as The River (1868) or The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1867) give a
clear accounting of Monet's advance toward the Impressionist style.
In the beach and sea pictures of 1865–67 Monet was plainly not
trying to reproduce faithfully the scene before him as examined in
detail but rather attempting to record on the spot the impression
that relaxed, momentary vision might receive—what is seen rather
than what is known, with all its vitality and movement. Boats,
buildings, incidental figures, and the pebble beach areswiftly
brushed in as flat colour patterns, with little attention paid to
their weight or solidity.
First Impressionist paintings
Monet's life during the 1860s was precarious and itinerant, and he
sold almost nothing; but several works were acceptedfor exhibition
in the yearly Salons, most notably, and with great success, a fine
but not yet Impressionist portrait of his future wife, Camille.
Having already painted in Paris, Le Havre, Chailly, Honfleur,
Trouville, and Fécamp and at other stations between Paris and the
sea, Monet ended the 1860s at the Seine River resort known as La
Grenouillère, at Bougival, where he and Renoir worked together for
the first time. In canvases almost identical in style, they made
rapid notations of pleasure-seekers and bathers, rowboats bobbing in
the foreground, and the scintillating reflections inthe lapping
water. Regarded by Monet as “bad sketches,” they were precursors of
the Impressionist style. Both artists' Bougival studies interpret
the light and movement of outdoor life in strong, abbreviating
strokes, improvised at the moment of perception, that serve as
equivalents for visual experiences never before committed to canvas
in such a direct manner. In 1870 at Trouville, in broad, assured
gestures, Monet painted a study of Camille on the beach. It is as
animated an example of visual realism as had ever been painted:
grains of sand remain embedded in the pigment.
As the 1870s began, Monet continued his pursuit of natural
phenomena. In order to avoid the Franco-German War, he lefthis son
and Camille, whom he had just married, and traveled to London.
There, with Pissarro, he was introduced by Daubigny to Paul Durand-Ruel,
who was to become his dealer. In 1871 and 1872 he painted canals,
boats, and windmills in The Netherlands and worked again at Le
Havre. On his return, Monet rented a house at Argenteuil, on the
Seine near Paris. The years he lived there mark the height of the
Impressionist movement. He helped organize an independent
exhibition, apart from the official Salon, of the Impressionists'
work in 1874. Impression: Sunrise (1872), one of Monet's works at
the exhibition, inspired the journalist Louis Leroy to give the
group their name.
Later Impressionism
Monet's celebrated method of producing works in series, each
representing the same motif under different light and weather
conditions, was not fully implemented until the 1890s, but what is
usually regarded as the first series was executed in or around the
Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris during the winter of 1876–77. A total
break with the customary Impressionist subjects, these works portray
the train engines belching smoke and steam in the great shed,
recalling J.M.W. Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western
Railway of 1844 and prefiguring the mechanical subjects painted by
Italian Futurists after 1909. Monet's life was less happy after he
moved to Vétheuil, farther from Paris. In 1876 a liaison began
between Monet and Alice Hoschedé, the wife of a department-store
owner and collector. Monet had incurred a burden of debts in
Argenteuil, and Camille was pregnant and ill. At Vétheuil the Monets
were joined by Hoschedé, who had left her husband, and six of her
children. Using funds from her dowry she assumed Monet's debts and
cared for Camille, who died in September 1879.
By 1881 the original Impressionist group had begun to disintegrate,
although it was still to hold two more exhibitions—the eighth and
last (in which Monet did not show) in 1886, after the advent of
Neo-Impressionism. Only Monet continued with the same fervour to
carry on the scrutiny of nature. Among the sites he chose during the
1880s were Pourville, Étretat, Fécamp, and Varangéville in Normandy;
the rugged and isolated Breton island of Belle-Île; the wild Creuse
River valley; Menton and Antibes in the Midi; and Bordighera in
Italy. In 1886 he made a second visit to The Netherlands, to paint
the tulip fields, before important sojourns at Étretat and Belle-Île.
In 1883 Monet, Hoschedé, her children, and Monet's sons, Jean and
Michel, settled at Giverny, a hamlet near Vernon, 52 miles (84 km)
from Paris, on the tiny Epte River. There Monet purchased a
farmhouse surrounded by an orchard, which was to be his home until
his death and is now a French national monument. After the travels
of the 1880s, Monet spent the '90s at or near Giverny, concentrating
on one series after another.
Last years
After 1900, two ambitious projects, both far from Giverny, concluded
Monet's search for new motifs. The first (for which he made at least
three trips to London between 1899 and 1904) was the extensive
multiple series representing the River Thames, the Waterloo and
Charing Cross bridges, and the Houses of Parliament. The
works—exotic coloration and mysterious romantic mood—recall the
Thames paintingsof Turner and James McNeill Whistler. In these
paintings it is atmosphere, more than the particularities of these
structures, that is Monet's subject; buildings and bridges are less
tangible than the pulsating brushstrokes that give volume to the
light-filled fog and mist. The second and last ofthe architectural
motifs Monet pursued was the canals and palaces of Venice. Monet
began this series in 1908 and continued in 1909, although he worked
on these subjects at Giverny until 1912. Venice was a perfect
Impressionist subject, but the light, water, movement, architecture,
and reflections in the water are more generalized in these works
than the specific weather effects of the haystack and cathedral
series.
In 1893 Monet had bought a strip of marshland across the road from
his house and flower garden, through which flowed atributary of the
Epte. By diverting this stream, he began to construct a water-lily
garden. Soon weeping willows, iris, and bamboo grew around a
free-form pool, clusters of lily pads and blossoms floated on the
quiet water, and a Japanese bridge closed the composition at one
end. By 1900 this unique product of Monet's imagination (for his
Impressionism had become more subjective) was in itself a major work
of environmental art—an exotic lotusland within which he was to
meditate and paint for almost 30 years. The first canvases he
created depicting lilies, water, and the Japanese bridge were only
about one square yard, but their unprecedented open composition,
with the large blossoms and pads suspended as if in space, and the
azure water in which clouds were reflected, implied an encompassing
environment beyond the frame. This concept of embracing spatiality,
new to the history of painting and only implicit in the first
water-lily paintings, unfolded during the years from 1915 until the
artist's death into a cycle of huge murals to be installed in Paris
in two 80-foot oval rooms in the Orangerie of the Tuileries. These
were described in 1952 by the painter André Masson as “the Sistine
Chapel of Impressionism.” Thiscrowning achievement of Monet's long,
probing study of nature—his striving to render his impressions, as
he said, “in the face of the most fugitive effects”—was not
dedicated until after his death. The many large studies for the
Orangerie murals, as well as other unprecedented and unique works
painted in the water garden between 1916 and 1925, were almost
unknown until the 1950s but are now distributed throughout the major
private collections and museums of the world. Despite failing
eyesight due to cataracts, Monet continued to paint almost until his
death in1926.
Assessment
Although critical acclaim was slow in coming, Monet attracted the
dedicated support of collectors throughout his career, most notably
from Americans who discovered his work in the 1880s. His influence
on other artists was wide-ranging, from his near contemporaries such
as Vincent van Gogh to a diverse new generation of artists such as
Émile Bernard, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de
Vlaminck. During the years 1886 to 1914, a predominantlyAmerican
colony of artists gathered around him in Giverny and regarded him as
an exemplar of modern French painting.They adopted his fresh
palette, subject matter, and spontaneous style, eventually
introducing these elements toAmerican art.
After his death, Monet's influence on contemporary art ebbed among
the avant-garde, who favoured the more radical examples of artists
such as van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp. A
revival of interest in his work occurred in the early 1950s. Monet's
epic scale and formal innovations influenced Abstract Expressionist
painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and a general
scholarly reassessment of his importance began to develop. Wildly
popular retrospective exhibitions of his worktoured the world during
the last decades of the 20th century and established his
unparalleled public appeal, sustaining his reputation as one of the
most significant and popular figures in the modern Western painting
tradition.
William C. Seitz
