MONET Early Life Impressionism Death Of Camille Giverny Later Years Death
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Claude Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (14 November 1840—5 December 1926) was a French painter and a founder of French Impressionist painting. He was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting.
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The term “Impressionism� is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet’s ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a home and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works.
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Early Life
Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), 1872; the painting that gave its name to the style and artistic movement.
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Claude Monet was born on 14th November 1840 in Paris and was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet. In 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre Dame de Lorette, as Oscar Claude. Despite being baptized Catholic; Monet later became an atheist. In April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre Secondary School of the Arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, an art teacher at his school. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him how to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet “en plein air” (outdoor) techniques for painting.
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Above: Woman in a Garden, 1867, Hermitage, St. Petersburg; a study in the effect of sunlight and shadow on colour. Right: Springtime, 1872, Walters Art Museum
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When Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools, he would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met other young painters, including Édouard Manet and others who would become friends and fellow Impressionists. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, FrÊdÊric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken colour and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
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Impressionism From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists met with rejection from the conservative AcadĂŠmie des Beaux-Arts, which held its annual exhibition at the Salon de Paris. During the latter part of 1873, Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley organized the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers to exhibit their artworks independently.
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La GrenouillĂŠre, 1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; a small plein-air painting created with broad strokes of intense colour.
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At their first exhibition, held in April 1874, Monet exhibited the work that was to give the group its lasting name. He was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet. Impression, Sunrise was painted in 1872, depicting a Le Havre port landscape. From the painting’s title the art critic Louis Leroy, in his review titled “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes”, which appeared in Le Charivari, coined the term “Impressionism”. It was intended as disparagement but the Impressionists appropriated the term for themselves. The first Impressionist exhibition was held in 1874 at 35 boulevard des Capucines, Paris, from 15 April–15 May. The primary purpose was not so much to promote a new style, but to free themselves from the constraints of the Salon de Paris. The exhibition gave artists the opportunity to show their work without the interference of a jury. In addition to Impression: Sunrise, Monet presented four oil paintings and seven pastels. Among the paintings he displayed was The Luncheon (1868), which features Camille Doncieux and Jean Monet, and which had been rejected by the Salon de Paris. Altogether, 165 works were exhibited, including art by Morisot, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Cézanne.
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The Magpie, 1868–1869. Musée d'Orsay, Paris; one of Monet's early attempts at capturing the effect of snow on the landscape.
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Death Of Camille In 1876, Camille Monet became ill with tuberculosis. Their second son, Michel, was born on 17 March 1878. This second child weakened her already fading health. In the summer of that year, the family moved to the village of Vétheuil. They shared a house with the family of Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. In 1878, Camille Monet was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She died on 5 September 1879 at the age of 32. Monet made a study in oils of his wife. Many years later, Monet confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau that his need to analyse colours was both the joy and torment of his life. He explained,“I one day found myself looking at my beloved wife's dead face and just systematically noting the colours according to an automatic reflex!”
Right: Camille Monet on her deathbed, 1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
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Giverny At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his family rented a home and 2 acres from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend, and the surrounding landscape offered many suitable motifs for Monet's work. The family worked and built up the gardens, and Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, had increasing success in selling his paintings. By November 1890, Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building well-lit with skylights.
Water Lilies and the Japanese bridge, 1897–99, Princeton University Art Museum
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Monet wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books. As Monet's wealth grew, his garden evolved. Monet also purchased additional land with a water meadow. In 1893 he began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. White water lilies local to France were planted along with imported cultivars from South America and Egypt, resulting in a range of colours including yellow, blue and white lilies that turned pink with age. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in a series of large-scale paintings. This scenery, with its alternating light and mirror-like reflections, became an integral part of his work. By the mid-1910s Monet had achieved a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art.
Right, Top: Water Lilies, c. 1915, Neue Pinakothek, Munich Right, Bottom: Water Lilies, 1917–1919, Honolulu Museum of Art
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“COLOUR IS MY DAYLONG OBSESSION, JOY, AND TORMENT.”
Later Years Monet's second wife, Alice, died in 1911, and his oldest son Jean, Monet's particular favourite, died in 1914. After Alice died, it was during this time that Monet began to develop the first signs of cataracts. During World War I, in which his son Michel served and his friend Georges Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of weeping willow trees as homage to French fallen soldiers. In 1923, he underwent two operations to remove his cataracts. The paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye; this may have had an effect on the colours he perceived. After the operations he repainted some of his works, with bluer water lilies than before.
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Previous page, right: Walk (Road of the Farm Saint-Siméon), 1864, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo Above: Water-Lily Pond and Weeping Willow, 1916-1919, Sale Christie’s New York, 1998
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Death Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus only about fifty people attended the ceremony. At his funeral, his long-time friend Georges Clemenceau removed the black cloth draped over the coffin, stating, “No black for Monet!� and replaced it with a flower-patterned cloth.
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His home, garden, and waterlily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, his only heir, to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in 1966. Through the Fondation Claude Monet, the house and gardens were opened for visits in 1980, following restoration. In addition to souvenirs of Monet and other objects of his life, the house contains his collection of Japanese woodcut prints. The house and garden, along with the Museum of Impressionism, are major attractions in Giverny, which hosts tourists from all over the world.
The Cliffs at Etretat, 1885, Clark Institute, Williamstown
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Grace Diianni 2018