MONET, Claude

Monet’s fascination with impressions gleaned from nature is the hallmark of his art. He was influenced by the forces of nature: the variations in light and the changes in the seasons and times of day. In the present painting the light is still illuminating the horizon while growing steadily weaker along the road. The scene shown in the painting is a winter landscape, a less than spectacular window on nature in a season when atmospheric conditions are especially fleeting and fragile, and when even the tiniest variations in the light can alter the scene significantly from one moment to another.

This picture, one of the two landscapes depicting Montgeron, belonged to the decorative series commissioned by Ernest and Alice Hosched�, Monet’s friend who lived in that small town.

In adorning his friends’ house, Monet sought to bring indoors the freshness of the garden. This task fully accorded with his interest in monetary states of nature, in the elusive changeability of light and air.

Two women, accompanied by their children, are walking through the tall grass in a field full of poppies. Their fashionable hats and the parasols indicate that they are from the city and have come to take a restful walk in the country.

Monet showed this small picture at the first group exhibition held by the Impressionists in 1874. The picture is clear evidence of the Impressionist’s preoccupation with the then very modern themes of leisure and relaxation.

In the summer of 1867, Monet painted a number of works en plein air at Sainte-Adresse, including the Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Beach at Sainte-Adresse (Art Institute, Chicago) which form a pair. They are similar in size, and the point of view differs by only a few metres. The pair of paintings juxtaposes the sunny regatta, watched at high tide by well-dressed bourgeois, with an overcast scene at low tide, showing fishing boats hauled onto the beach peopled with sailors and workers.

The expressive quality of this painting made a strong impression on Vincent van Gogh who admired the works of Monet.

In 1883 and 1884 Monet traveled to the south, from Marseille to the Italian Riviera to get new inspiration. First he was accompanied by Renoir, then he returned alone to Bordighera. He painted about fifty paintings characterized by intensive and expressive colours.

This view of the Boulevard des Capucines was taken from the studio of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Indeed, the painting shows some resemblance to a photo. It is a snapshot full of life, with some of the passers-by and trees blurred in precisely the way that contemporary photographers of urban landscapes were unable to avoid, given the length of their exposure times.

Monet was a successful caricaturist in Le Havre, but after studying plein-air landscape painting, he moved to Paris in 1859. He soon met future Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir and Monet began painting outdoors together in the late 1860s, laying the foundations of Impressionism. In 1874, with Pissarro and Edgar Degas, Monet helped organize the Soci�t� Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., the formal name of the Impressionists’ group. During the 1870s Monet developed his characteristic technique for rendering atmospheric outdoor light, using broken, rhythmic brushwork. Throughout his career, he remained loyal to the Impressionists’ early goal of capturing the transitory effects of nature through direct observation. In 1890 he began creating paintings in series, depicting the same subject under various conditions and at different times of the day. His late pictures, made when he was half-blind, are shimmering pools of colour almost totally devoid of form.

This painting was exhibited in 1882 at the seventh Impressionist exhibition. Vincent van Gogh probably saw the painting in Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery when he arrived in Paris in early 1886.

In 1893, Monet purchased land with a pond near his property in Giverny, and he built here his water lily garden with a Japanese bridge spanning the pond at its narrowest point. In 1899, he began a series of eighteen views of the wooden footbridge over the pond, completing twelve paintings, including the present one, that summer. The vertical format of the picture, unusual in this series, gives prominence to the water lilies and their reflections on the pond.

Camille, the model of this painting, was the mistress of the painter at this time.

This painting depicts Camille Monet, the painter’s wife, wrapped in a kimono and surrounded by fans. She wears a blond wig. The canvas was exhibited in 1876 at the second group exhibition of the Impressionists.

Camille, Monet’s first wife died in 1879 after a long illness. Monet did a pale pink and blue study of her on her deathbed, the evanescent fluidity of which seems to articulate the slipping away form life of the loved one.

In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Monet and his family settled in London. He painted his intimate interior depicting his wife on a couch, which resembles Whistler’s The Artist’s Mother painted in the same year.

In February 1882 Monet went to Normandy where he spent six months. In this period he painted many times the cliffs and the view of the sea above and below them.

In 1882, Monet stayed for a few months in Normandy, in the small fishing village of Pourville. He painted several canvases in the countryside, the cliffs and the view of the sea above and below them. The figures in the present landscape are probably Marthe and Blanche, the eldest daughters of her second wife, Alice Hosched�, who joined him in Pourville with her children.

To the west of Argenteuil, near Paris, where Monet lived between 1872 and 1878, he painted the Fields of Bezons c. 1873. This unusually light-hearted canvas of a woman with a parasol seated in the grass first appeared in the major Impressionist exhibition of 1876 at Durand-Ruel1s gallery and was also included in the Monet-Rodin exhibition of 1889.

Monet landscape experiments in the mid-1860s resulted in some particularly striking works, such as the Garden at Sainte-Adresse which he painted in 1867 near Le Havre. In this work he abandoned the contrasts and somber tones of his early years in favour of a juxtaposition of bright fresh colours (greens, reds, blues) in a tiered composition with an unusually high horizon such as he might have found in Japanese prints.

The picture is rendered in dazzling colour. Monet’s father and aunt are seated in the foreground facing the sea. His cousin is seen standing with a man, possibly her father, in the middle ground. The direction of the sun tells us that it is mid-morning; the gladiolas tell us that it is mid-summer. The raised vantage point of the picture - Monet was painting in a window on the second floor - divides the composition into three horizontal registers that seem to rise parallel to the surface of the canvas rather than recede into space.

Monet painted this canvas in the summer of either 1866 or 1867 while he was in Sainte-Adresse, a village near Le Havre where he spent his youth. The painting, with its captivatingly strong and luminously bright colours, reveals the small but deliberately chosen corner of a garden.

At the beginning of 1877, Monet moved near to the Gare Saint-Lazare, of which he was subsequently to paint twelve different views. This was the first experiment that the artist had made with the technique of serial repetition of a motif, a way of working that was to become typical of him from the late 1880s onward.

The newly constructed railway stations seemed to be an embodiment of the idea of modern, mobile, progressive living, a theme which the Impressionists had adopted in their works. Monet captured the fa�ade and the surroundings of the station, as well as the concourse with trains arriving at the platforms. However, he only made preliminary drawings from life. The oil paintings themselves were executed in the studio.

By contrast with the usual interior views of the Gare Saint-Lazare, the present painting shows the gigantic iron and glass construction of the roof, with its apex placed symmetrically at the top of the picture on the vertical axis.

In 1877 Monet rented a studio near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and in the 3rd Impressionist exhibition of that year he exhibited seven canvases of the railway station. This painting is one of four surviving canvases representing the interior of the station.

In 1890-91, Monet produced a large series of paintings showing a haystack at different times of the day and in various weather conditions. In this earlier composition, the haystack already plays the chief role and gives the main notes in the colour scheme.

Monet’s 1891 canvas of little houses on modest lots at the summer resort of Argenteuil shows the town where the artist lived between 1872 and 1878.

In May 1871, Monet left London for the Netherlands and for a few months settled with his wife, Camille, and son, Jean, in Zaandam, halfway between Amsterdam and Haarlem. here he painted over twenty landscapes. The influence of Dutch landscape painting can be observed in his later seascapes of Rouen and Argenteuil.

A famous seaside resort on the Normandy coast, Trouville was one of the most popular holiday destinations for Parisian society at around this time. The elegant building is one of the plush, new holiday hotels on the Normandy coast, an area with which the painter had been familiar since childhood. In this painting, thanks to the rapid, expressive brushwork, the clouds appear foreshortened and the flags are fluttering as if in tatters in the wind. Even the figures, like the man raising his hat on the left, are sketchily captured with just a few brush strokes.

This canvas is one of the dozen paintings which Monet painted on the frozen Seine in the winter of 1892-93 from a point not far from his house in Giverny.

In France, public and critics both had a great deal of fun at the expense of the independent exhibitions organized in Paris. It was a journalist, Alfred Leroy, who coined the nickname “Impressionist,” having used the word in his famous satirical article in Charivari on April 25, 1874. The trigger had been a work that Monet had painted in Le Havre two years earlier and that was listed in the catalog as Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). As early as 1877, the initially pejorative term was adopted by the artists themselves and used as a rallying cry.

In 1883 Monet rented a country house in Giverny, a small town situated between Paris and Rouen. He loved the estate so much that he bought it in 1890 and lived there until his death in 1926. When Monet took over the property he discovered an orchard, which over the following years he changed into a sea of flowers. The geometrical construction of the lower beds is clearly visible in the present painting. From Monet’s later paintings it can be seen that he was constantly changing the garden.

In his garden in Giverny, Monet painted the lush opulence of flowers, shrubs, overhanging trees and patchwork light. There is no horizon to our field of vision and this perpetuates the abiding Impressionist ambition to harmonize spatial depth and surface.

The painting depicts Jean, Camille and Claude Monet’s first son at the age of 5 on his mechanical horse.

In 1869, Renoir and Monet produced a whole series scenes of modern life painted outdoors. Their subject was La Grenouill�re (literally “frogpond”). Situated on the banks of the Île de Croissy on the Seine near Paris (opposite Bougival), La Grenouill�re was an elegant establishment built on a barge and combining bathing cabins and a restaurant. It was reached by footbridges and a small island with a tree, from which one watched the bathers. The island forms the centrepiece of a pair of twin compositions by the two artists. Monet’s is the more structured, while Renoir’s is livelier, more tightly framed, and more picturesque. Both paintings devote much attention to the reflections of trees, people, and sky in the rippling water.

�tretat, a Norman fishing village popular among artists of Courbet’s generation and, later, the Impressionists. Its great cliffs, rising so precipitously from the beach and from the waters provided a striking contrast to sand-bound or storm-tossed boats below, and with the ever-changing sea and sky.

One of the main features is a rock formation known as Porte d’Aval (or Aiouille), where a natural flying buttress appears to support an equally natural, crenellated tower. This sense of implicit architecture suggests a great city lost in primeval times. There are two other formations called Porte d’Amont, and the Manneporte.

The cliffs at �tretat inspired Monet, who was a frequent visitor to the Normandy coast from the 1860s onward.

This painting, depicting a beach scene at Sainte-Adresse near Monet’s home town of Le Havre, was one of the two landscapes which Monet exhibited at the 1865 Salon in Paris. A first version, now in the National Gallery, London, was painted at the site in 1864, the present larger version was executed during the first months of 1865 in Monet’s Paris studio.

The impact of Courbet on Monet has sometimes been overshadowed by his relations with Manet or his older relationship with Jongkind and Boudin on the Normandy coast, yet Monet’s admiration for the champion of Realism is clearly visible in the huge Picnic (4,6 by 6 meters) which was unfinished and later rolled up and then cut up. In one of the two large fragments preserved in the Mus�e d’Orsay it is possible to recognise, seated among the guests in a clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, the figure of Courbet himself. The overall composition (as preserved in the smaller version in Moscow) did not yet include Courbet, and we know that Bazille posed for four male figures.

The impact of Courbet on Monet has sometimes been overshadowed by his relations with Manet or his older relationship with Jongkind and Boudin on the Normandy coast, yet Monet’s admiration for the champion of Realism is clearly visible in the huge Picnic (4,6 by 6 meters) which was unfinished and later rolled up and then cut up. In one of the two large fragments preserved in the Mus�e d’Orsay it is possible to recognise, seated among the guests in a clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, the figure of Courbet himself. The overall composition (as preserved in the smaller version in Moscow) did not yet include Courbet, and we know that Bazille posed for four male figures.

Encouraged by some success in the 1865 Salon and spurred on by Manet’s Le D�jeuner sur l’herbe, which appeared two years earlier, Monet began work on a huge canvas measuring approximately 4,5 m x 6 m. He worked on it in his studio with the aid of individual studies which had been done in the open. In 1866, he abandoned this ambitious work and left the painting unfinished.

Having been forced to leave the canvas with a creditor as security, he was not able to redeem it until 1884. In the meantime, the painting had unfortunately been damaged. Consequently, Monet cut the composition up in three sections, only the left-hand and middle sections have been preserved. A study carried out in September 1865 (now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow) gives an impression of the full-scale painting which contained no fewer than 12 life-size figures.

In 1867, a wealthy friend and patron, Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, a shipowner, commissioned Monet to paint three portraits. Two were to be of Gaudibert himself and the third one of his wife.

This full-length portrait of Madame Gaudibert illustrates just how easily Monet was able to turn his hand to official portraiture. The woman’s elegant posture lives up to the idealised concept of formal portraiture existing at that time. What was unusual, was the fact that the subject of the portrait had averted her head.

This life-size portrait represents the painter and engraver Jules Ferdinand Jacquemart. It was executed in academic style, setting the figure in a perspectivically composed landscape.

It was after moving to Giverny, 80 kilometres northwest of Paris, in 1883 that Monet first took a keen interest in the rural landscape. While there he became fascinated with the effect of fog obscuring the boundaries of objects and softening colours. It was also in Giverny that he would paint his celebrated series of water lilies.

This painting reflects the artist’s interest in the depiction of gardens, particularly his own. In Argenteuil in the 1870s, in V�theuil in the early 1880s, and most notably in Giverny — where he resided for the last forty years of his life — Monet took an active role in tending his own garden.

While at V�theuil, Monet produced at least nine paintings of his garden, all in the same year. Four identical compositions (this work among them) are painted from the same vantage point, depicting the staircase and path at the centre, flanked by beds of sunflowers and blue and white ceramic vases filled with gladioli.

Monet traveled to Venice with his wife Alice in 1908 and 1909. He painted several pictures with views of the Canal Grande, Rio de la Salute, San Giorgio Maggiore, and various palaces such as the Palazzo Contarini. However, these paintings were executed from memory in his studio in Giverny.

In 1883 and 1884 Monet traveled to the south, from Marseille to the Italian Riviera to get new inspiration. First he was accompanied by Renoir, then he returned alone to Bordighera. He painted about fifty paintings characterized by intensive and expressive colours.

In one of the two large fragments preserved in the Mus�e d’Orsay it is possible to recognise, seated among the guests in a clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, the figure of Courbet himself.

This picture belongs to the series of twelve paintings treating the Gare Saint-Lazare. This version shows the station from the outside.

During much of 1891 Monet worked on a series of paintings depicting the tall, thin poplar trees that lined the River Epte near his home at Giverny, France. Using a shallow rowboat that had slots in the bottom capable of holding several canvases at once, Monet painted twenty-four pictures of the poplars from his floating studio. He worked on several pictures at once, exchanging one canvas for another as light and weather conditions changed during the day. The resulting paintings reflect the view at different seasons and times of day and were known as the Poplar Series when they were exhibited in February 1892.

In the 1860s and 1870s the Impressionist painters worked primarily outdoors. By the mid-1880s, most members of the original group had turned away from Impressionism, but Monet continued to paint in this style.

The small town of Argenteuil had become famous because of painters, like Monet, who lived there from 1871 to 1878. One of Monet’s early work from this period, Regatta at Argenteuil, was once in the Caillebotte collection.

The main motif of the picture is the water. It is the element that corresponded most closely to the Impressionists’ view of the world because it contained a multitude of visual images of the world in its countless reflections, and because at the same time it could be interpreted as being symbolic of the tendency to drift.

In the summer of 1867, Monet painted a number of works en plein air at Sainte-Adresse, including the Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Beach at Sainte-Adresse (Art Institute, Chicago) which form a pair. They are similar in size, and the point of view differs by only a few metres. The pair of paintings juxtaposes the sunny regatta, watched at high tide by well-dressed bourgeois, with an overcast scene at low tide, showing fishing boats hauled onto the beach peopled with sailors and workers.

Till 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil. From 1872 on, he painted on the river bank at Argenteuil, looking either up- or downriver. According to which way he chose, the trees cluster as verticals at the left or right edge, their shadows n the path parallel horizontals.

When Monet began his serial compositions in the late 1880s, which initially featured haystacks, then polars, and in the early 1890s the cathedral at Rouen, these works constituted a logical progression of his artistic interests. By constantly portraying the same subject, the variables determined by the time of the day and the lighting could be particularly strongly accentuated. Different times of day and a changing colour palette were substituted for innovative subject matter. Monet included the time of the day and the dominant colours in the respective titles of his paintings as a matter of course.

Sometimes he worked simultaneously on two canvases, in order to be able to react immediately to changing light conditions. As a result, the subject of the picture receded further and further into the background. At first glance we can see the shape of a cathedral, but on closer inspection the cathedral architecture dissolves before our eyes into a vibrant ensemble, composed merely of a collection of brush strokes.

“What a task this cathedral is!” wrote Monet from Rouen, in a letter to his wife in Giverny. He painted nearly thirty views of the cathedral’s fa�ade, moving from one canvas to the next to capture different moments throughout the day. After returning home, he continued to work on this series for two more years. The encrusted brushstrokes on this canvas evoke the blinding radiance of sunlight glinting off pale stone. When the painting is viewed from a distance, the cathedral’s arched doorways, rose window, and towers become clearly visible.

When Monet began his serial compositions in the late 1880s, which initially featured haystacks, then polars, and in the early 1890s the cathedral at Rouen, these works constituted a logical progression of his artistic interests. By constantly portraying the same subject, the variables determined by the time of the day and the lighting could be particularly strongly accentuated. Different times of day and a changing colour palette were substituted for innovative subject matter. Monet included the time of the day and the dominant colours in the respective titles of his paintings as a matter of course.

Sometimes he worked simultaneously on two canvases, in order to be able to react immediately to changing light conditions. As a result, the subject of the picture receded further and further into the background. At first glance we can see the shape of a cathedral, but on closer inspection the cathedral architecture dissolves before our eyes into a vibrant ensemble, composed merely of a collection of brush strokes.

The present version shows the fa�ade and the Tour Saint-Roman in the morning (harmony in white).

When Monet began his serial compositions in the late 1880s, which initially featured haystacks, then polars, and in the early 1890s the cathedral at Rouen, these works constituted a logical progression of his artistic interests. By constantly portraying the same subject, the variables determined by the time of the day and the lighting could be particularly strongly accentuated. Different times of day and a changing colour palette were substituted for innovative subject matter. Monet included the time of the day and the dominant colours in the respective titles of his paintings as a matter of course.

Sometimes he worked simultaneously on two canvases, in order to be able to react immediately to changing light conditions. As a result, the subject of the picture receded further and further into the background. At first glance we can see the shape of a cathedral, but on closer inspection the cathedral architecture dissolves before our eyes into a vibrant ensemble, composed merely of a collection of brush strokes.

�tretat, a Norman fishing village popular among artists of Courbet’s generation and, later, the Impressionists. Its great cliffs, rising so precipitously from the beach and from the waters provided a striking contrast to sand-bound or storm-tossed boats below, and with the ever-changing sea and sky.

One of the main features is a rock formation known as Porte d’Aval (or Aiouille), where a natural flying buttress appears to support an equally natural, crenellated tower. This sense of implicit architecture suggests a great city lost in primeval times. There are two other formations called Porte d’Amont, and the Manneporte.

The cliffs at �tretat inspired Monet, who was a frequent visitor to the Normandy coast from the 1860s onward.

Flags were flown on 30 June, 1878, to mark the opening of the Great Exhibition. On that day, a sea of flags was fluttering in the wind, and countless people filled the streets. Monet chose a high vantage point in order to emphasize the huge gathering of people. Viewed at close quarters, the milling throng gives the illusion of an ethereal carpet of colour. It is not until one is at a certain distance from the painting that the concrete aspect of the picture comes into focus, and the people on the streets become recognizable as well as the individual flags, which look as though they have been released from the fa�ades of the houses to the left and right.

Flags were flown on 30 June, 1878, to mark the opening of the Great Exhibition. On that day, a sea of flags was fluttering in the wind, and countless people filled the streets. Monet painted two pictures on this occasion, depicting the Rue Montorgueil and the Rue Saint-Denis, respectively.