50. Claude Monet,
Camille (Woman with Green Dress), 1866.
Oil on canvas, 231 x 151 cm. Kunsthalle, Bremen.
51. Claude Monet,
Portrait of Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert, 1868.
Oil on canvas, 217 x 138.5 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
52. Claude Monet, Women in a Garden, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 255 x 205 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
53. Claude Monet,
The Luncheon: Decorative Panel, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 160 x 201 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
It was also at Chailly, in 1865, that Monet began to paint Luncheon on the Grass, inspired by Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. This painting had little in common with Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, apart from the motif of a picnic on the grass and the charm of an authentic landscape painted directly from nature. To judge from the remaining fragments, the canvas was rather dark. The static figures bring mannequins to mind. Monet had not yet got past the profusion of detail characteristic of genre painting. A young girl sets out the dishes on a tablecloth, and a dog is running in the foreground. Someone has carved initials and dates on the trunk of a birch tree, and behind it a young man is hiding. But already there is something here that points towards Monet’s future: the sun, as it pierces through the greenery of the trees, fragments it into small, juxtaposed patches, and the coloured shadows on the women’s elegant dresses are painted with pure colours. In 1866 Monet painted the portrait of Camille Doncieux, his future wife – Woman in the Green Dress. It was an unexpected success and was taken note of by Zola, who had not yet met Monet. “There is more than a realist here, there is an interpreter of delicacy and intensity,” he wrote in l’Événement. “Look at the dress. It is supple and solid. It trails gently, it is alive. It says out loud who this woman is” (D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Paris, 1971, p. 18). Yet, far more than this young, fashionable Parisian’s social characteristics, or the art of representing fabrics, what points towards the Monet of the future is the colour.
54. Claude Monet, The Luncheon on the Grass, 1865.
Oil on canvas, 130 x 181 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
During the 1860s Monet occasionally visited his parents’ home in Normandy. His disagreements with his family were a source of continual distress for him. In 1867 Monet’s father ordered him to spend the summer at Sainte-Adresse under his aunt’s surveillance to keep him away from Camille, who was just about to give birth to their first son, Jean. His father threatened to withdraw financial support completely if he married. Monet was in despair, and in such a state of nervous agitation that he even began to lose his vision – the worst misfortune possible for a painter. He was fortunate to find a doctor in Le Havre who would treat him. All the same, Monet was under the spell of Sainte-Adresse, about which he wrote, “It’s charming, and I’m discovering things still more beautiful every day. It’s driving me mad, there’s so much I feel like doing” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 21).
He painted a series of landscapes at Sainte-Adresse that brought him one step further towards Impressionism. Indeed, Regattas at Sainte-Adresse (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, and Woman in the Garden (Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum) are all dated 1867. Monet painted a bright blue sea, rippling with tiny waves, with the vast Normandy sky as smooth as a mirror and sprinkled with clouds. Pure colours appear on his canvases, unmixed with one another. Red flowers shimmer in the green grass, coloured pennants flutter in the wind. Sunlight floods his paintings. Monet painted a wonderful garden, of the type that is the pride of Normandy. The owners of Normandy gardens rival one another over their plant arrangements, which alternate brilliantly coloured beds of flowers with small, scattered flowering trees against a background of green lawn.
In 1867 Monet had already begun to analyse the colours he saw and had discovered what Delacroix, in his time, had found. It was that black and white do not exist in nature. There is colour everywhere, one only needs to be able to see it. For that purpose it is essential to educate, to train one’s eye, and Monet made a start on this difficult task.
The close of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s were not an easy period for Claude Monet. In 1868 he finally married Camille Doncieux. Without his father’s support, life with his family was proving very difficult. During the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune he stayed in England. In London Monet met Pissarro and Charles-François Daubigny. Paul Durand-Ruel himself passed through London during the war period, and Daubigny introduced him to Monet. From that moment and for many years onward, Durand-Ruel would be Monet’s dealer and loyal supporter, and that for all the other Impressionists as well. Monet returned to France via Holland, whence he brought back some wonderful landscapes. When, at the end of 1871, Monet and his family returned to France, they moved to the banks of the Seine, at Argenteuil.
55. Claude Monet, Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.
Oil on canvas, 98.1 x 129.9 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
56. Claude Monet,
The Corner of the Garden at Montgeron, 1876.
Oil on canvas, 172 x 193 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
57. Claude Monet, The Pond at Montgeron, 1876-1877.
Oil on canvas, 173 x 194 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
58. Claude Monet, Lilacs in the Sun, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
But there was little sense of celebration in the painter’s life. They had quickly gone through Camille’s resources. Monet’s letters to his friends, to Édouard Manet, and to Durand-Ruel were full of appeals for help.
Following Daubigny’s example, Monet built a floating studio for himself. Since Monet often painted out in the middle of the river, the viewer is situated inside the landscape in these paintings. The concrete of one railroad bridge and the ironwork of another introduced an element of modern life into this rural idyll. Monet depicted these bridges many a time from different angles. At times he also painted the train: its amusing little carriages blend in nicely with the landscape. He painted the Seine at Argenteuil using broken brushstrokes of colour, either pure or mixed with white, rapidly applying paint to canvas and completing the painting entirely in the open air. Regattas at Argenteuil (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), a not-very-large canvas with a dazzling blue sky, a red roof and white sails, became a veritable celebration of colour. The painter applied his colours in thick strokes with a brush or a palette knife, giving the impression of reflections gradually fading on the water’s surface. It was already there – that truly open-air painting that would be designated “Impressionism” the following year. At the same time Monet was attentively studying tree foliage, discovering an infinite quantity of gradations in nuance that his predecessors had never suspected existed. The little garden beside his house was the only motif he needed. Monet painted this garden from different angles, each time discovering something lovely and new there. Camille and their son Jean were his constant subjects, seated beneath the trees or walking along the country paths. But even when his wife or his son or one of his friends appeared in the painting, the painter was more interested in the atmospheric haze, or patches of sunlight on light-coloured dresses. The flowering beds of lilacs became Monet’s favourite motif in the garden (Lilacs in the Sun). The warm yellow-green tone of the grass in the sun is in contrast to the cool, grey-green tone of the shadow. The pale, purple-pink flowers become a source of light. Sunlight playing over the foliage throws a pink tint over Camille’s dress, which is hidden in the shadows. But most of all there is that hazy heat that no one, before Monet, had ever tried to render in a painting. It effaces all the edges, saps everything of its sharpness and definition, and produces that very “impression” which
would later give this art form its name. Argenteuil played a special role in Monet’s life. He painted hundreds of landscapes there that virtually paved the way for the impact his paintings would have at the time of the first exhibition in 1874. With the exhibition of the Société Anonyme in mind, Monet painted a great many landscapes in Normandy, along the Seine. In January 1874 he travelled to his cherished village of Le Havre and moved into the Hotel de l’Amirauté, near the port. From his window he could see the port’s ceaseless activity, the waiting-lines at the ticket windows, the cases being piled high, and the boats departing. One of the landscapes he painted at that time was a view of the port of Le Havre, composed after the Japanese system of perspective. The image fills the entire canvas just to the upper edge (The Grand Dock at Le Havre, Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum). Claude Monet shared the general infatuation of that period with the Japanese masters, and was among the first to familiarise himself with their pictorial art. But in choosing the works for the exhibition Monet favoured the view from the hotel window, where the port could not be seen, and where the essential element was the veil of morning mist. This landscape, called Impression, sunrise would decide the fate of the exhibition’s participants. They became “Impressionists”, and Claude Monet was unanimously designated head of the group.
59. Claude Monet, Argenteuil’s Railway Bridge,
between 1873 and 1874.
Oil on canvas, 55 x 72 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Another painting of Claude Monet’s was the revelation of the 1874 exhibit. It was his first urban landscape The Boulevard des Capucines, painted in 1873. It also had a prophetic character; it was there that, one year later, the famous exhibition would open. Two Parisians in top hats are looking out the second-floor window of Nadar’s studio. There is practically no sky in this landscape: the new buildings and hotels rise to the upper limit of the canvas. Their shadow divides the space into night and day. The side lit by the sun is flooded with light, and the bare branches of the trees are nearly dissolved in it. They create that golden mist, through which only vague, elusive shapes can be seen. In the deep blue shadow the human figures appear more distinctly, though even here they are part of a single moving mass. One can feel the rhythm of modern life in this landscape of Monet’s. It is Haussmann’s Paris, and for the first time it has become the subject of a painting. In it, despite the sceptical attitude of Monet’s contemporaries towards the new architecture, the painter has discovered a specific beauty.
60. Claude Monet, The Bridge of Europe,
Saint-Lazare Station, 1877.
Oil on canvas, 64 x 81 cm. Musée Marmottan, Paris.
During the summer of 1874 after the exhibition, Édouard Manet frequently visited Monet in Argenteuil. He carefully observed his painting process and painted Monet with Camille on their floating studio.
At difficult moments in their lives Monet and the other Impressionists were assisted by their friends. They did not have many, but these provided both material support by buying their paintings and, more importantly, the warmth of their friendship. Among them were the amateur painter Gustave Caillebotte, who had exhibited along with the Impressionists and who enjoyed a considerable fortune. The baritone of the Paris Opera, Jean-Baptiste Faure, bought paintings by Édouard Manet and some Impressionists, including many paintings by Monet. The Parisian civil servant Victor Chocquet bought paintings by the Impressionists as soon as he had sufficient funds. Dr. Gachet owned some works by Monet and his friends, whom he treated as the need arose. The financier and editor of the art review L’Art de la Mode (Art Now), Ernest Hoschédé, bought paintings and invited the painters to his estate. In July 1876 Édouard Manet spent two weeks at Hoschédé’s home in Montgeron, south of Paris.
61. Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Station, 1877.
Oil on canvas, 75.5 x 104 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
This was where the Château Rottembourg, which the financier’s wife Alice Raingo had inherited from her husband, was located. After Manet it was Monet’s turn to be invited to Montgeron that same summer. Hoschédé commissioned some decorative panels by Monet for the main receiving room at Montgeron. He put a large studio not far from the château at Monet’s disposal, along with a little fisherman’s cabin on the banks of the Yerres River, where he also painted. The amateur painter in the family was Alice. She and her husband had at first collected the works of painters of the Barbizon School, and later those of the Impressionists. Monet painted four decorative panels with the park at Montgeron as his subject.
Decorative painting was a new field for Monet. These large, almost square canvases are little more than enlarged Impressionist paintings. Because of their dimensions it was impossible to paint out of doors. Monet worked on them in the studio from studies, yet these panels have all the qualities of open-air painting. One has the impression that the painter has transferred a corner of the garden as he saw it in nature directly onto the canvas, with no concern at all for the composition (Corner of the Garden at Montgeron). The flowering shrubs are cropped by the lower edge of the canvas, and the bright blue of a part of the pond can be seen. A style of composition that was not classical, but seemed instead to be chosen at random, was one of the methods used by the Impressionists. The roses are painted with juxtaposed brushstrokes of white lead and red which, through an optical phenomenon, give the viewer the impression of fresh flowers suffused with morning dew. The light blue haze of a hot summer’s day softens the colours in the background. Another of Monet’s panels begins with a pond shadowed by trees that takes up two-thirds of the height of the canvas (Pond at Montgeron). A bank of damp mist conceals the human figures. The eye can barely make out one lady with a fishing rod standing in the shadow of a tree, another reclining in the grass, and two figures walking away. Only in the background do the trees part, leaving the field open to the warm, golden sunlight. Instead of grey-blue in the far distance, Monet paints the background in warm tones, like Édouard Manet in Luncheon on the Grass. The painter has overturned all the classical rules of aerial perspective. The water is painted with thick strokes of the palette knife, and is composed of patches of white lead, sky blue, green, and brown. The various reflections in the foreground keep it from assuming the traditional yellowish-brown tint. One could not work according to the old methods if one wanted to capture the effects created in nature by changes of colour.
At the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time: seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monet’s work is in line not only with Manet’s The Railway and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear. These made a deep impression on painters and many of them represented the event in their art, starting with the English painter Turner, who painted a locomotive in 1844, and on through to the Lumière brothers, whose first publicly-shown work in 1895 was the film “Train Arriving”. From that moment onward the serial painting would be his favourite procedure.
62. Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-1874.
Oil on canvas, 80.3 x 60.3 cm.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
63. Claude Monet,
Rue Saint-Denis in Paris on National Holiday,
June 30th 1878, 1878.
Oil on canvas, 76 x 52 cm.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.
64. Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil,
National Holiday, June 30th 1878, 1878.
Oil on canvas, 81 x 50.5 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The close of the 1870s was the most difficult period in Monet’s life. In 1878 the family had to leave Argenteuil. Monet’s financial situation continued to worsen despite his friends’ assistance. For a short time he moved to Paris, where Camille gave birth to his second son, Michel, but living in Paris was too exp
ensive. On the banks of the Seine, which he was still painting, Monet discovered Vétheuil, a charming town not far from Mantes. The Monet family moved there in 1878, along with Alice Hoschédé and her six children. The youngest of them, Jean-Pierre, was born nearly at the same time as Michel Monet. There has even been speculation that he himself was Monet’s son because, after the painter’s stay at Montgeron, he and Alice had begun an intimate relationship. The two youngest boys were called “les petites”, and they appeared frequently in Monet’s landscapes. Beside the house there was a garden full of blossoming sunflowers. Sunlight radiates through the garden in Monet’s canvases. Although Monet’s work didn’t include many still life paintings, he could not resist the temptation to paint the cut sunflowers in a vase (Bouquet of Sunflowers, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Under his brush the yellow flowers were miraculously transformed into sunlight. At Vétheuil Alice helped Monet look after his children and care for Camille, who was seriously ill. In 1879 Camille died. Monet painted her on her deathbed, unable to resist the pull of colour even at such a tragic moment in his life.
During all this time the painter worked tirelessly. He painted the shapes of villages with Gothic and Romanesque churches reflected in the waters of the river, islands in the Seine, and poplar trees. He worked in clear weather, in fog, and in the rain with the meticulousness of a scholar studying methods of rendering the atmosphere in painting. Hoschédé was coming to Vétheuil more and more rarely. In 1881 he demanded that Alice return, but it was too late. Monet was happy with Alice, and considered her children his own. Even their constant financial difficulties did not cast a pall over their happiness. But because of these difficulties they were forced to move to Poissy, not far from Vétheuil. From a painter’s standpoint, this new location held no attraction for Monet.
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