Monet
For Claude Monet the designation ‘impressionist’ always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them – surrounded by air and light. Indeed, it was Boudin who passed on to Monet his conviction of the importance of working in the open air, which Monet would in turn transmit to his impressionist friends. Monet did not want to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, L’Académie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai d’Orfèvres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro. Later in Gleyre’s studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends. He also told his friends of another painter he had found in Normandy. This was the remarkable Dutchman Jongkind. His landscapes were saturated with colour, and their sincerity, at times even their naïveté, was combined with subtle observation of the Normandy shore’s variable nature. At this time Monet’s landscapes were not yet characterized by great richness of colour. Rather, they recalled the tonalities of paintings by the Barbizon artists, and Boudin’s seascapes. He composed a range of colour based on yellow-brown or blue-grey. 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 Chemin de fer (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. In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, “My studio! I’ve never had a studio, and I can’t see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes – to paint, no”. Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, “There’s my real studio.”Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. 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 further in that direction.
Читать Monet онлайн беплатно
© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA
© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA
Foreword
It was Claude Monet’s Impression: Sunrise painted in 1873, which caused disapproving critics to contemptuously apply the name ‘Impressionist’ to the whole movement with which he was associated. Here is a magnificent collection of the great master’s works. There are many full-colour plates of his earlier works, such as the famous Lady in the Garden Sainte-Adresse (1867) and The Pond at Montgeron (1876–1877) in both of which the artist’s extraordinary ability to capture atmosphere and light are shown in starkly contrasting scenes. Examples of several of the series of paintings of the same subject which Monet was fond of producing – Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the London series – are included here, as are his numerous depictions of his favourite resorts, Sainte-Adresse and Etretat on the Alabaster Coast of Normandy.
Biography
Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875
Oil on canvas, 85 × 60.5 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
1840: 14 November, Claude Oscar Monet is born in Paris.
1845: The Monet family moves to Le Havre.
1858: Makes the acquaintance of Boudin, who introduces him to plein-air painting.
1859: Goes to Paris. Meets Troyon. Frequents the Académie Suisse, where he meets Pissarro.
1860: Draws at the Académie Suisse. Paints landscapes at Champigny-sur-Marne. In the autumn, is called up for military service.
1861: Serves with the army in Algeria.
1862: Discharged for health reasons. In the summer, works at Sainte-Adresse together with Boudin and Jongkind. In November, returns to Paris. Attends the studio of Gleyre. Meets Renoir, Sisley and Bazille.
1863: Works at Chailly-en-Bière near Fontainebleau. At the end of the year Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille leave the studio of Gleyre.
1864: Works at Honfleur with Bazille, Boudin and Jongkind. In Paris, meets Gustave Courbet.
1865: Exhibits two seascapes in the Salon. Spends the summer at Chailly together with Bazille. In the autumn, works at Trouville with Courbet, Daubigny and Whistler.
1866: Paints views of Paris. Exhibits Woman in a Green Dress (Camille) in the Salon. Meets Edouard Manet. At Ville d’Avray, paints Women in the Garden; in Le Havre, The Jetty at Le Havre; then works at Sainte-Adresse and Honfleur.
1867: Experiences financial hardship. Lives with his parents at Sainte-Adresse. In the autumn, returns to Paris.
1868: Works at Etretat and Fécamp.
1869: Together with Renoir, works at Bougival, where he paints La Grenouillère. Moves to Etretat, then to Le Havre.
1870: In September, goes to London.
1871: Stays in London. Daubigny introduces him to Durand-Ruel. Meets Pissarro. Travels to Holland. Reveals an interest in Japanese prints. Returns to France visiting Belgium on his way. In December, stays at Argenteuil.
1872: Together with Boudin, visits Courbet imprisoned for his participation in the Commune. Works at Le Havre, where he paints Impression: Sunrise. After his second trip to Holland, settles at Argenteuil (until 1878).
1873: Works at Argenteuil in a studio boat, painting the banks of the Seine.
1874: Shows nine works at the exhibition later to be called the First Impressionist Exhibition held at Nadar’s (15 April-15 May, 35 Boulevard des Capucines). Meets Caillebotte.
1875: Continues to work at Argenteuil. Difficult financial situation.
1876: In April, takes part in the Second Impressionist Exhibition, at the Durand-Ruel Gallery (11 Rue Le Peletier), showing eighteen works. Begins the Gare Saint-Lazare series, which he finishes the next year.
1877: In April, participants in the Third Impressionist Exhibition (6 Rue Le Peletier), displaying thirty paintings. Visits Montgeron. In the winter, returns to Paris.
1878: Settles at Vétheuil.
1879: At the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition (10 April-11 May, 28 Avenue de l’Opera) shows twenty-nine paintings. Works at Vétheuil and Lavacourt.
1880: His one-man show at the premises of the newspaper La Vie Moderne. Works at Vétheuil.
1881: Works at Vétheuil, Fécamp and, in December, at Poissy.
1882: In March, at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition (251 Rue Saint-Honoré) shows thirty-five paintings. Works at Pourville, Dieppe and Poissy.
1883: In March, his one-man show at the Durand-Ruel Gallery. In May, stays at Giverny. Works in the environs of Vernon, in Le Havre, and at Etretat. In December, makes a short trip to the Mediterranean with Renoir. Visits Cézanne at l’Estaque.
1884: From 17 January to 14 March, works at Bordighera. In April, stays at Menton; in August, at Etretat; in the autumn, at Giverny.
1885: Takes part in the International Exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery. From October to December, works at Etretat.
1886: A brief trip to Holland. Refuses to take part in the Eighth (last) Impressionist Exhibition. Contributes to the International Exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery. A show of Monet’s paintings in New York. In September, works at Belle-Ile, where he meets Geffroy.
1887: Shows two paintings at the Exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists in London.
