During this period he painted frequently in Normandy, exploring the beauty of its seaports: Fécamp, Dieppe, Varengeville. He was often absent for several months at a time, and the search for motifs sometimes took him fairly far from home. In December 1883 Monet and Renoir travelled through Provence together, and afterwards went on to Genoa. During this trip they discovered Bordighera, a wonderful location in Italy near the French border. Wherever he worked, Monet did not forget his family. “So know once and for all that you are my whole life, along with my children,” he wrote Alice from Bordighera, “and while I work I never stop thinking of you. This is so true that, with every motif that I do, that I choose, I say to myself I must render it really well, so you can see where I was and what it’s like” (D. Wildenstein, op. cit., p. 48). However they were not truly a happy family until after the death of Ernest Hoschédé in 1892. The marriage of Alice and Claude Monet took place at Giverny 16 July 1892.
65. Claude Monet, Cliff Top Walk at Pourville, 1882.
Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 82.3 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Ten years earlier, in 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. “What enchanted Monet,” recounted Alice’s youngest son, “was the view of the magnificent horizon on which Giverny opens its windows” (Jean-Pierre Hoschédé, Claude Monet, ce Mal Connu [The Little-Known Claude Monet], Genève, 1960, t. 1, p. 20). Monet looked at the world with a painter’s eyes, and there were so many motifs for him there. Monet was lucky and immediately found a large country house where a studio could be set up. Around it stretched a large meadow where it was possible to create a garden. Monet rented this house without hesitation, and bought it soon after. He lived there until the end of his life.
The peasants did not accept the painter’s family right away: the city people seemed odd to them. But they were won over by Monet’s passion for work, which they witnessed continually. Every day, no matter what the weather, they saw the painter at his work in the fields. Monet felt at home right from the start. “I’m enraptured,” he wrote the critic Duret. “Giverny is a splendid place for me” (L’Impressionnisme et le Paysage Français, [Impressionism and the French Landscape], op. cit., p. 248). Wherever he went he never forgot Giverny. Alice’s daughter Blanche, who married Claude’s older son Jean, stayed with Monet until the end of his life, taking care of the old painter after her mother’s death.
66. Claude Monet, The Manneporte (Étretat), 1886.
Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.4 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
67. Claude Monet,
Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and her Son, 1875.
Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
68. Claude Monet, Study of a Figure in Open Air:
Woman with Parasol Facing Right, 1886.
Oil on canvas, 131 x 88 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
69. Claude Monet, Study of a Figure in Open Air:
Woman with Parasol Facing Left, 1886.
Oil on canvas, 131 x 88 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
At Giverny, series painting became one of Monet’s chief working procedures. Thirty years later he recounted how he had arrived at it. “I was painting some haystacks which had caught my eye and which made a terrific group, just a short distance from here. One day I noticed that my light had changed. I said to my stepdaughter ‘Go to the house and get me another canvas, if you don’t mind.’ She brought it to me, but shortly after, it was different again. Another ! And one more ! And I wouldn’t work on any of them unless I had my effect, and that was it” (D. Wildenstein, op. cit., p. 57). The haystacks became a nearly endless series in his work. He painted them at the very beginning of summer, on the green grass, and in winter, with a thin layer of snow covering them. To Monet’s sensitive eye there was an infinite diversity of colours in this mass of dry, yellowed grass. In various combinations, his red, brown, green, and even blue brushstrokes depicted the way the colours change according to the distribution of light.
70. Claude Monet, The Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874.
Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 80 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
71. Claude Monet, The Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874.
Oil on canvas, 60 x 79.7 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
72. Claude Monet, The Cliff, Étretat, Sunset, 1883.
Oil on canvas, 55 x 81 cm.
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.
At the beginning of the 1890s Monet travelled to Rouen. In 1892 he went there to purchase back some of his own paintings that his half-sister Marie had inherited. Monet took a room facing the famous Gothic cathedral. As he was obliged to stay in Rouen for some time he began to paint the cathedral from his window. He had meant to return to Giverny after several days, but his work absorbed him completely. He painted the cathedral in all weather and at all times of day or night. When lit by the sun at midday the enormous mass of the cathedral dissolved in the hazy heat, its contours became blurred, and the building became lighter and nearly transparent. At night the blue shadows were deeper and denser, and the gothic-filigree stonework of the façade appeared in all its splendour. In reality the motif in Monet’s painting wasn’t Rouen Cathedral at all, it was the light and air of Normandy. The result was a veritable symphony of colours. Art had never, up to that point, seen anything like it. In the spring of 1895 Monet opened his exhibition, where he showed twenty variations of his Rouen Cathedral (p. 102, 103). Sadly, the critics’ exhortations to the buyers to purchase the series as a whole went unheard, and Monet’s “Cathedrals” were scattered throughout the world.
The meadows of Giverny always remained his favourite motif. In the luxuriantly flowering grass with its poppies exploding in tiny flames, Monet’s practiced eye, trained by years of work, could distinguish a vast number of graded nuances. He created an extremely delicate mosaic on the canvas, composed of tiny brushstrokes of colour. Paul Cézanne, who had criticised Monet for copying unthinkingly from nature, said of him one day, “He’s nothing but an eye.” But, quickly catching himself, he added “But what an eye !” (Camille Mauclair, Claude Monet, Paris, 1924, p. 51). These meadows became his permanent workplace. He painted a field of poppies, and created the impression of wind not only with the rippling shapes of the trees, but also in the way the painting itself was executed. Brushstrokes of pure colour – red, blue, and green – are applied to the canvas with apparent randomness. The tangle of these colours renders the effect of the grass stirring under the wind’s breath and, in addition, composes a wonderful tapestry. Each fragment of such a landscape, taken separately, amounts to a complete colour composition in itself. Claude Monet was the first of the nineteenth-century painters to understand the abstract beauty of the canvas’ painted surface.
Monet painted most often in Normandy. It had an inexhaustible diversity, and his fondness for it had begun long before. He dreamt of showing Alice and the children the cliffs in the region of Caux, the flowering fields overlooking the sea, and the little fishing hamlets tucked into the recesses of the coast. Earlier, in his youth, Boudin had brought him onto the cliffs near Dieppe, where he experienced the revelation of the Normandy landscape’s diversity. From the end of the 1860s onward Monet explored the beauty of Étretat. But Monet found his own motifs there. What most interested him were the atmospheric phenomena that alter nature’s colour. The reflections of the water shifted constantly, and alighted in coloured patches on the cliffs. The cliffs themselves seemed to go into motion, together with the sea and the clouds.
73. Claude Monet, Grand Canal, Venice, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.4 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
74. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral,
Portal and Saint-Romain Tower (Full Sunlight), 1893.
Oil on canvas, 107 x 73 cm.
Musée d’
Orsay, Paris.
75. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Evening, 1894.
Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
76. Claude Monet,
Houses of Parliament, Sun down (detail), 1900-1901.
Oil on canvas, 81 x 92 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
77. Claude Monet,
Haystacks at Giverny, Sunset, 1888-1889.
Oil on canvas, 65 x 92 cm.
The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Urawa-shi.
The English serial paintings mark a point in the natural evolution of Monet’s way of rendering atmospherics. Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and at the beginning of the 1900s he devoted a series of paintings to the Thames River. The painter usually stayed at the Hotel Savoy at Victoria Docks. He either painted from the windows of the hotel, to the left of which stood Waterloo Bridge, or from the windows of St Thomas’ Hospital, with a good view of Parliament. The Waterloo bridge series numbered forty-one canvases, and the Parliament series nineteen. Monet was now explicitly making the famous London fog the sole motif of his canvases.
Perhaps Monet’s extraordinary eye did in fact see this multitude of nuances in nature; perhaps his painter’s imagination was freely creating this colour harmony on the canvas. He began all the London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. His individual canvases had no independent existence, in his eyes. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time.
A friend of Monet’s, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the Impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits; it is unlikely that one could have gone any farther in that direction.
78. Claude Monet, Poppies, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
One of Monet’s last trips was one he took with Alice, in 1908, to Venice. To distract themselves from family troubles they accepted an invitation from Alice’s friend, Mary Young Hunter. Monet was in a bad mood and did not even want to work, declaring that everything was too beautiful in Venice. Nevertheless in the end, as always, he allowed nature to beguile him. The canvases that he painted in Venice are full of vibrating colours. The sunlight’s soft reflections slide over the water of the canals and fade in the humid haze, tracing the shapes of the churches.
The 1890s were marked by a new passion in Monet’s life. He threw himself into the creation of his garden at Giverny, as he had thrown himself into the creation of serial paintings. Monet himself drew the shape of the pond and the little bridges that crossed it, which afterwards served as motifs for his landscapes. Jean-Pierre Hoschédé wrote this about the gardens: “They were unique as a group because they had been imagined, conceived, and executed not by a gardener, but by an Impressionist who created them as he would have created a painting from nature” (J.-P. Hoschédé, op. cit. t. 1, p. 65).
79. Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1880.
Oil on canvas, 151.5 x 121 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
80. Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914-1915.
Oil on canvas, 160 x 180 cm.
Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon.
81. Claude Monet,
Water Lilies, Water Landscape, Clouds, 1903.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 100 cm. Private Collection.
Monet painted an enormous number of landscapes of his own garden. They became a veritable obsession. The motif he loved most were the water lilies. These aquatic flowers first appeared in many Normandy gardens at the turn of the century: they had come into fashion along with the taste for all things Japanese. In his garden Monet assembled a multitude of plants of the most varied types. He ordered them by catalogue from various locales, often even from abroad.
Monet died at Giverny 6 December 1926. He had survived all the other Impressionists, and had seen Matisse and the “Fauves” at the Autumn Salon of 1905. In 1907 he had witnessed the appearance of Picasso’s Cubism. He had lost a son, dead in 1914, had watched the second go off to fight in the First World War, and had read the Surrealist Manifesto published by André Breton. It is common to observe that at the end of his life Monet was no longer an Impressionist. The Water Lilies is indeed painted, contrary to his usual style, with big brushstrokes, the glittering light has dimmed, the juxtaposed touches of pure colour have disappeared, and the painting has become darker. Certain portions of the panel are painted with such large, indistinct patches of colour that the images of the trees and flowers disappear. The painting becomes almost abstract. But in front of the Water Lilies one loses all sense of canvas and of colours. Monet’s Water Lilies surrounds the viewer with the pond’s stagnant water, with the waxy cup-shapes of his flowers, and the weeping willows bent over them. The impression of sensing nature’s breath all around one is so intense that only an Impressionist could have produced it.
82. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Umbrellas, about 1881-1886.
Oil on canvas, 180.3 x 114.9 cm.
The National Gallery, London.
83. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Young Girls in Black, 1881.
Oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR
Pierre Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841. He was the sixth child in the family of Léonard Renoir and Marguerite Merlet. Three years later, in 1844, the Renoirs moved to Paris. In 1848 Auguste began attending a school run by the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. Renoir excelled in musical theory and was soon accepted into the choir at the Église Saint-Eustache, directed by the composer Charles Gounod. Fate, however, decided otherwise. In 1854, the boy’s parents took him from school and found a place for him in the Lévy brothers’ workshop, where he was to learn to paint porcelain.
One of the Lévys’ workers, Émile Laporte, painted in oils in his spare time. He suggested Renoir make use of his canvases and paints. This offer resulted in the appearance of the first painting by the future Impressionist. It was solemnly presented for Laporte’s inspection at the Renoir’s home. Edmond Renoir recollected: “The trial lasted a quarter of an hour at least, after which, without any superfluous comments, that poor old man came up to our parents and told them: ‘You should let your son go in for painting. In our trade the most he will achieve is to make twelve or fifteen francs a day. I predict a brilliant future for him in art. Do all you can for him’” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 335). That is how family legend recorded the birth of Renoir the artist. Showing faith in their son, Auguste’s parents heeded Laporte’s advice. His mother only suggested saving some money first, so that it would be possible to get by for a year at least, as they could not reckon on their son bringing anything in. The future artist’s parents knew how hard it was to make money – Léonard Renoir’s work as a tailor barely enabled him to keep his seven children – and could imagine that there was very little likelihood of making much in high art. But that could not be helped… Pierre Auguste Renoir positively acknowledged the role his family had played in shaping his future.
After moving from Limoges, Léonard Renoir installed his family near the Louvre. Only remnants of the old decoration – coats-of-arms, capitals, empty niches that once held statues – served as reminders of the past. Now occupied by lower class Parisians, this little district had a special atmosphere about it, oddly combining the everyday and the elevated. The young Renoir’s wanderings covered a far wider area than the Louvre district, though.
A sense of the fullness of life in all its variety and disregard for any kind of rules seized the visitor when he left Saint-Eustache and plunged into the
atmosphere of the surrounding market. The market had been there since the twelfth century. In 1137 King Louis VI founded it outside the city walls, while under Louis Philippe it had been included into the municipality. Les Halles became an inseparable part of Paris. The air of the city was laced with its smells.
84. Pierre Auguste Renoir, La Grenouillère, 1869.
Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 81 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
An organic, almost physical sense of himself as part of the city was even then, in childhood, shaping the future artist’s work. He saw beauty in the narrow, almost mediaeval streets of old Paris, in the heterogeneity of the elements of Gothic architecture, in the never-corseted figures of the female market traders. And he suffered from the fact that the old Paris, his Paris, was being destroyed. Ironically, it was the period of Renoir’s childhood and youth that saw the greatest burst of reconstruction and modernisation in the history of the city. In 1851, for example, a start was made on the new steel-framed market designed by the architect Baltard to replace the disparate pavilions of the old Halles. The ten-year-old saw it with his own eyes. In those same 1850s and 1860s, the map of the city was redrawn in accordance with the grand plan of the prefect of Paris, Baron Haussmann. Daumier drew Parisians who, although strolling along the Champs-Élysées, were under constant threat of being crushed by some heavy girder or buried in one of the pits gaping beneath their feet. When the Renoirs were still living in the Louvre, Auguste sometimes went hunting with one of the neighbours to fields lying near the village of Les Batignolles. Now the Gare Saint-Lazare sprang up in their place and the pure country air was replaced by the soot of locomotives. Renoir was horrified by the broad boulevards and the building of the Grand Palais constructed for the 1900 World Fair. He regretted that a German shell had not destroyed the architect Charles Garnier’s Grand Opéra and grieved that the restorer Viollet-le-Duc had cleared Notre-Dame of the various outbuildings that had surrounded it for centuries. He believed that Viollet-le-Duc had inflicted greater damage on the architecture of Paris than the German bombardments and all the preceding wars and revolutions. Eventually, in 1854, the threatened destruction of the old houses inside the Louvre became a reality and the family chose to move to another old district of Paris – the Marais, which from that moment on also formed part of Renoir’s world.
Impressionism Page 6