Claude Oscar Monet was a French impressionist
painter who brought the study of the transient effects of natural
light to its most refined expression.
|
|
Route de Chailly à
Fontainebleau, 1864 |
Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris,
but he spent most of his childhood in Le Havre. There, in his
teens, he studied drawing; he also painted seascapes and landscapes
outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boudin. By 1859 Monet
had committed himself to a career as an artist and began to spend
as much time in Paris as possible. During the 1860s he was associated
with the pre-impressionist painter Edouard Manet, and with other
aspiring French painters destined to form the impressionist school-Camille
Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.
Working outside, Monet painted simple landscapes
and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and he began
to have some success at official exhibitions. As his style developed,
however, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after
another in the interest of direct artistic expression. His experiments
in rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct, sketch-like application
of bright color became more and more daring, and he seemed to
cut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as
a conventional painter supported by the art establishment.
|
|
Impression : soleil levant
1873, Musée Marmottan, Paris |
In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to appeal
directly to the public by organizing their own exhibition. They
called themselves independents, but the press soon derisively
labeled them impressionists because their work seemed sketchy
and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet's
paintings had borne the title Impression: Sunrise. Monet's compositions
from this time are extremely loosely structured, and the color
was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of
the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated
to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression
of nature.
|
|
Montagnes de l'Estérel, 1888
Courtauld Institute Galleries |
During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined
this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France,
especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the
most brilliant effects of light and color possible.
|
|
Le bassin aux Nympheas
1899, Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as
the leader of the impressionist school, had achieved significant
recognition and financial security. Despite the boldness of his
color and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he was recognized
as a master of meticulous observation, an artist who sacrificed
neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his
own feelings. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in
the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began
to construct a water garden (now open to the public)-a lily pond
arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps
of bamboo.
|
|
Le Parlement: effets de brouillard, 1904
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg |
Beginning in 1906, paintings of the pond and
the water lilies occupied him for the remainder of his life; they
hang in the Orangerie, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and
the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Throughout these years
he also worked on his other celebrated "series" paintings, groups
of works representing the same subject-haystacks, poplars, Rouen
Cathedral, the river Seine-seen in varying light, at different
times of the day or seasons of the year. Despite failing eyesight,
Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on
December 5, 1926, at Giverny.
In 1900, Monet has become famous. On the occasion
of an exhibition in Paris a journalist of the Temps, Thiébault-Sisson,
made him tell his life. On November 26, 1900, the newspaper Le
Temps published this autobiography in which Monet builds himself
his legend. The text is spicy but doesn't always reflect reality
faithfully ...
Visit Monet's garden in Giverny at http://www.giverny.org
