MONET, CLAUDE

MONET, CLAUDE (1840–1926), French painter.

Claude Monet is arguably the best known of the impressionists, a group of largely French artists who challenged conventions in painting that had developed since the Renaissance and that laid the foundations for modern trends in the arts. Radical in both their techniques of painting and their choice of subject matter, Monet and his impressionist companions like Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) exhibited at eight independent exhibits between 1874 and 1886. These artists painted out-of-doors, contended that they were not painting objective reality, but momentary perceptions of light reflected from objects under constantly changing climatic conditions, and painted scenes of "modern life" in contemporary France. Although an ardent proponent of impressionism, Monet had a larger and more complex career, and his corpus of approximately two thousand paintings reveals an artist whose lifework evolved through three major phases, each with its own distinctive character.

In 1926, the last year of his life, Monet looked back on his career as an artist and commented in a letter to Evan Charteris: "I have always had a horror of theories… . My only virtue is to have painted directly in front of nature, while trying to render the impressions made on me by the most fleeting effects."

Source: Letter from Monet to Evan Charteris, 21 June 1926 (Wildenstein 2626), quoted in: John House, "Monet: The Last Impressionist?" In Monet in the Twentieth Century, edited by Paul Hayes Tucker and others. London and Boston, 1998, p. 3.

monet before impressionism

Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but he spent much of his early life in Le Havre and along the Normandy coast. Local renown as a caricaturist brought him the attention of the landscape painter Eugéne Boudin (1824–1898) in the mid-1850s, and it was Boudin who introduced Monet to outdoor landscape painting. After his mother's death in 1857, Monet went to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Suisse and encountered other young artists like Camille Pissarro. Following a brief period of military service, Monet studied with the academic painter Charles Gleyre (1806–1874) and met, among other artists, Frédéric Bazille, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. He spent the summer of 1862 at Sainte-Adresse painting with Boudin, and there he encountered the Dutch landscape artist Johan-Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891), who together with Boudin had a decisive influence on Monet's career. Accordingly, most of Monet's works in these early years were landscapes and seascapes, many of which were painted out-of-doors, and they demonstrated an interest in light and its impact on the perception of objects. With painting excursions to the Forest of Fontainebleau and Honfleur behind him, Monet moved to Paris in 1865. That year he debuted at the Salon with two works, The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur and the Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide, and he subsequently exhibited at the Salons of 1866 and 1868. Meanwhile he failed to complete a huge Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which exists today only in fragments.

After 1868, his submissions to the Salon were rejected. Perhaps stimulated by the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann (1809–1891) in the 1850s and 1860s, Monet began to take an interest in urban life and he painted three cityscapes in 1867, including The Church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Personal problems, including poverty and the pregnancy of his mistress Camille-Léonie Doncieux, plagued Monet during the late 1860s. Nonetheless, he continued painting, producing among other works the celebrated Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1867). In 1870 he married Camille and, because of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), left France for London, where he met Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922), who later became his dealer. Returning to France, he rented a house in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, where he resided until 1878.

the years of impressionism

In 1873 Monet painted Impression: Sunrise, an atypical work that he exhibited with others at the first exhibition of impressionist art in 1874, an exhibition that was independent of the government-sanctioned Salon that had previously rejected the work of Monet and his fellow exhibitors. Reviewing the exhibition, the hostile critic Louis Leroy (1812–1885) commented on this painting, labeling the exhibitors as "impressionists." Monet's work in the 1870s depicts scenes around his home at Argenteuil, particularly The Road Bridge at Argenteuil (1874) and The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1874). He exhibited eighteen works at the second impressionist exhibition in 1876. The next year, he painted twelve views of the Gare Saint-Lazare, a modern Parisian railroad station, the first of Monet's ventures of devoting a series of paintings to the same object, depicting it under different climatic conditions. He showed thirty works at the third impressionist exhibition in 1877. The Monets moved to Vétheuil in 1878, and his wife, Camille, died there the next year. He continued to exhibit at most of the impressionist exhibitions, although not at the final one in 1886. Painting excursions took him to the Normandy coast and elsewhere, and he executed a prodigious number of seascapes and other works, including views of the rock arch at Etretat. Meanwhile, his paintings began to sell, and in 1883 he rented the house at Giverny, which he bought in 1890 and where he lived for the remainder of his life.

Works by Monet and others exhibited at the impressionist exhibitions, particularly the early ones, attracted much criticism. Behind this hostility was the challenge the impressionists made to the government-sanctioned Salons. There were exhibited paintings by academically trained artists, and they often depicted historical, mythological, or literary scenes. Impressionist paintings, in contrast, depicted modern urban scenes like the Gare Saint-Lazare, tourist sites like the Normandy coast, and the modern leisure activities of the middle classes. Moreover, Monet and the impressionists did not paint "reality." They sought to depict instead the fleeting perception of light reflected from objects under differing climatic conditions. The resulting paintings, critics charged, resembled rough sketches rather than carefully finished paintings. The world of Monet was thus a subjective one. For this reason, some historians place him in the context of a profound transformation of the Western intellectual tradition called the "Crisis of European Thought." This "crisis" involved, among others, challenges to the Newtonian worldview by scientists like Max Planck (1858–1947), assaults on traditional morality by critics like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and reevaluations of conventional notions of human nature by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In short, a world of objective certainties was being replaced by one of uncertainty and subjectivity. Characteristic of Monet's subjective view of the world was his later series of thirty paintings of the west façade of Rouen Cathedral. Monet's interest was not the monumental cathedral itself, but the appearance of the cathedral at different times of day and under varying conditions of weather. Accordingly, a view of the façade in the morning appears dark and restrained, while a view painted in the late afternoon reveals the full impact of the sun on the building, making it brilliantly and

variously colored. Monet has dematerialized the façade of the cathedral and transformed it into a surface upon which there is an endless play of light. Unfortunately, Monet did not write much about the ideas behind his paintings, so his intentions must be surmised rather than demonstrated.

monet after the impressionist decade

Monet's annual painting excursions largely ceased when he bought the house at Giverny and married Alice Hoschedé. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, he worked on the series paintings, The Grainstacks, the Poplars on the Epte, the Façade of Rouen Cathedral, and the Mornings on the Seine. For the remainder of his life, with a few notable exceptions like his three trips to London (1899–1904), where he painted views of the Thames and its vicinity, Monet focused his attention on Giverny and making his garden, with its pond, Japanese bridge, and water lilies into a work of art. He then repeatedly depicted this garden, often with a cool detachment. He also isolated himself from contemporary movements in painting, like the postimpressionism of Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). Late in his life, his eyesight began to fail, and he struggled to continue painting. Monet's renderings of his gardens became more and more abstract, the colors appear more blurred and intermingled, and the paintings grew ever greater in size. Indeed, the acclaimed water lily murals required for their installation in Paris the construction of a special museum in the Orangerie of the Tuileries. Monet died at Giverny on 5 December 1926.

interpretations of monet

Early studies of Monet were primarily biographies and collections of letters and documents by authors who had known him. Virtually all are in French and have not been translated. Modern studies begin with the rediscovery of Monet after World War II. Many combined a brief biographical sketch with a rich selection of plates, each with detailed commentary. Representative of such works are William C. Seitz, Claude Monet (1960) and Joel Isaacson, Claude Monet: Observation and Reflection (1978). Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (1983) provide, in addition to the reproductions of paintings, a useful collection of photographs, selections from Monet's letters, and passages from contemporary reviews. More recently, scholars like Robert J. Herbert, Virginia Spate, and Paul Hayes Tucker have attempted to situate Monet within the social, political, and cultural context of Third Republic France. Making their task challenging is the absence in Monet's letters of references to contemporary events.

See alsoCézanne, Paul; Degas, Edgar; Fin de Siècle; France; Impressionism; Manet, Édouard; Renoir, Pierre-Auguste; Van Gogh, Vincent.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Wildenstein, Daniel. Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné. 5 vols. Lausanne, 1974–1991.

Secondary Sources

Gordon, Robert, and Andrew Forge. Monet. New York, 1983. Biography mixed with analytical study of the paintings.

Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. New Haven, Conn., 1988.

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art. New Haven, Conn., 1986. A study of Monet's painting techniques, emphasizing the 1870s–1890s.

Isaacson, Joel. Claude Monet: Observation and Reflection. Oxford, U.K., 1978. Decade-by-decade study of Monet.

Moffett, Charles S., et al. The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886. San Francisco, 1986. Catalog of an exhibit that recreated the eight impressionist exhibitions.

Rachman, Carla. Monet. London, 1997.

Seitz, William C. Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments. New York, 1960. Brief biographical sketch with reproductions of famed paintings.

Spate, Virginia. Claude Monet: Life and Work. New York, 1992. Effectively blends biography with social history and the formal analysis of the paintings.

Tucker, Paul Hayes. Claude Monet: Life and Art. New Haven, Conn., 1995.

Robert W. Brown