Claude Monet
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face. - Claude Monet
French painter Claude Monet was the seminal figure in the development of impressionism style of painting, an important movement in the development of modern art. Also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet ( born November 14, 1840 - died December 5, 1926) was a father of French impressionist painting, and the most uniform and productive practitioner of the movement's doctrine of conveying one's perceptions before nature, particularly as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is traced from the title of the artist's own painting Impression, Sunrise.
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Claude Monet Biography
Claude Monet was born in the city Paris, France on November 14, 1840. His father was employed as grocer who relocated the family to Le Havre, on the Seine estuary when Monet was five years old. By the time Monet was 15 years of age he had acquired a local reputation as a caricaturist. Through an showing of his caricatures in 1858 Monet was intoduced to Eugène Boudin, a landscape painter who wielded a fundamental influence on the young artist. Boudin showed Monet the technique of outdoor painting, an action which he began reluctantly but which soon was converted to the foundation for his life's work.By 1859 Monet was driven to follow an artistic vocation. He traveled to Paris and was struck by the paintings of romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot. Against his parents' wants, Monet chose to remain in Paris. He was employed at the free Académie Suisse, where he encountered Pissarro, and he patronized the Brasserie des Martyrs, a meeting place for Gustave Courbet and additional realists who comprised the vanguard of French painting in the 1850s.
Monet's studies were disrupted by military service in Algeria 1860-1862. The rest of the decade saw ceaseless experimentation, traveling, and the establishment of several significant artistic friendships. In 1862 he went into the studio of Charles Gleyre in Paris and met Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Jean Frédéric Bazille. During 1863 and 1864 he sporadically worked in the woodland at Fontainebleau with the Barbizon style group of artists Théodore Rousseau, Jean François Millet, and Daubigny, along with as with Camille Corot. In Paris in 1869 he haunted the Café Guerbois, where he encountered Edouard Manet.
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At the eruption of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Monet journeyed to London, where he was introduced to the bold and sympathetic dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The next year Monet and his wife, Camille, whom he had wedded in 1870, established themselves at Argenteuil, which turned out to be a semipermanent home for the following 6 years, although Monet persisted in to traveling throughout his lifetime.Monet's steady drifts during this point were directly associated to his artistic aspirations. The phenomena of natural light, atmosphere, and color enthralled his imagination, and he devoted himself to an progressively precise recording of their fascinating diverseness. He consciously searched that diversity and bit by bit evolved a extraordinary sensitivity for the elusive details of each landscape he came across. Paul Cézanne is accounted to have said that "Monet is the most prodigious eye since there have been painters."
Comparatively few of Monet's canvases from the 1860s have endured. Throughout the decade, and during the 1870s as well, he suffered from extreme fiscal hardship and oftentimes ruined his own paintings instead of having them appropriated by creditors. A impressive instance of his early style is the Terrace at the Seaside, Sainte-Adresse done in 1866. The painting bears a shimmering array of brilliant, natural colors, shunning completely the somber browns and blacks of the previous landscape tradition.
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In 1960 William Seitz 1960 penned, "The landscapes Monet painted at Argenteuil between 1872 and 1877 are his best-known, most popular works, and it was during these years that impressionism most closely approached a group style. Here, often working beside Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte, or Manet, he painted the sparkling impressions of French river life that so delight us today."Through these corresponding years Monet exhibited on a regular basis in the impressionist member exhibits, the initial of which occurred in 1874. On that particular event his famous painting Impression: Sunrise of 1872 urged a aggressive newspaper critic to term all of the members of the artistic style "impressionists," and the designation has persisted to the present day.Monet's paintings from the 1870s expose the major dogmas of the impressionist sight. Along with Impression: Sunrise, Red Boats at Argenteuil of 1875 is an spectacular instance of the newly evolved style. In these paintings impressionism is fundamentally an visionary style, albeit one that looks radically unlike from the landscapes of the Old Masters. The departure dwells chiefly in the chromatic resonance of Monet's canvases. Working straight from nature, he and the impressionists identified that even the deepest shadows and the drabbest days carry an innumerable assortment of colors. To seize the fading effects of light and color, nonetheless, Monet bit by bit determined that he had to paint rapidly and to utilize curt brush strokes loaded with individualized colors. This process led to paintings which were infused with painterly action; in essence, they refused the even combining of colors and the polished, enameled surfaces to which most previous painting had supported.
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Nonetheless, in spite of this departures, the fresh style was illusion based - the rendering of what illusion comprised of had altered. For conventional landscape artists illusionist was disciplined first off by the intellect, painters were inclined to portray the single phenomena of the natural world - foliage, branches, flowers - as they had learned them and conceived their being. Monet, contrary to conventional and traditional thought, wished to paint what he saw instead than what he intellectually recognized. He experienced not disjointed leaves, but scatterings of perpetually ever-changing light and color. Seitz stated, "It is in this context that we must understand his desire to see the world through the eyes of a man born blind who had suddenly gained his sight: as a pattern of nameless color patches." In an crucial sense Monet dwells in the realm of custom of Renaissance illusionist - in registering the phenomena of the natural world, he merely founded his art on perceptual rather than abstract knowledge.Through the 1880s the impressionists started to disband as a united group, while separate members persisted in seeing one another and from time to time would continue to worktogether. In 1883 Monet relocated to Giverny, although he continued to journey to places such as London, Madrid, and Venice, in addition to as to favored places in his native land. He eventually acquired critical and financial success towards the end of 1880s and the 1890s. This was owed principally to the campaigns of Durand-Ruel, who supported one man exhibitions of Monet's work as early as 1883 and who, in 1886, also coordinated the first large scale impressionist style exhibit to be held in the United States.
Monet's painting during this period eventually leaned toward a fuller, more expressive style. In Spring Trees by a Lake 1888 the whole surface thrills with light and color. Paradoxically, as his style developed and as he persisted in developing the sensitivity of his sight, the purely illusionist aspect of his paintings started to vanish. Plastic form faded away into colored pigment, and three dimensional distance vaporized into a effervescent, strictly optical surface ambiance. His canvases, while invariably prompted by the visible world, more and more announced themselves as objects which are, above all, paintings. This character connects Monet's art more intimately with contemporary than with the Renaissance tradition.
Modernist, likewise, are the consecutive paintings to which Monet dedicated extensive energy through the 1890s. The most notable of these series are the haystacks 1891 and the frontals of Rouen Cathedral 1892-1894. Within these works Monet painted his themes from more or less the equivalent physical perspective, admitting only for the natural light and atmospheric circumstances to change from picture to picture. That is, he fixed the subject matter, addressing it like an observational invariant against which shifting impressions could be assessed and registered. This formula reflects the perseverance and devotion with which Monet followed his study of the seeable world. At the same time, the serial works in effect nullified subject matter or object, implying that paintings could subsist without it. In this way his art demonstrated an significant precedent for the evolution of abstract painting.
Monet's wife passed away in 1879; in 1892 he married his second wife, Alice Hoschedé. By 1899 his fiscal position was assured, and he started to work on his celebrated series of water lily paintings. Water lilies existed in richness in the artist's magnificent gardens at Giverny, and he painted them inexhaustibly until his end at his beloved home on Dec. 5, 1926. Monet's late years were by no means leisurely. During his last two decades he endured poor health and had double cataracts, sadly, by the 1920s he was nearly blind.
Along with his physical ailments, Monet fought urgently with the troubles of his art. In 1920 he started work on 12 large canvases, each of which measured fourteen feet in width, of water lilies, which he intended to endow to the state. To finish them, he battled against his own weakening eyesight and against the requirements of a large scale mural art for which his own past had scarcely trained him. In essence, the task necessitated him to learn a new kind of painting at the age of eighty years. The paintings are characterized by a liberal, sweeping style, nearly barren of subject matter, their large, surrounding spaces are rendered almost solely by color. Such color spaces were without precedent in Monet's life; furthermore, their descendants have appeared in modern painting solely since the end of World War II.
Modernist, likewise, are the consecutive paintings to which Monet dedicated extensive energy through the 1890s. The most notable of these series are the haystacks 1891 and the frontals of Rouen Cathedral 1892-1894. Within these works Monet painted his themes from more or less the equivalent physical perspective, admitting only for the natural light and atmospheric circumstances to change from picture to picture. That is, he fixed the subject matter, addressing it like an observational invariant against which shifting impressions could be assessed and registered. This formula reflects the perseverance and devotion with which Monet followed his study of the seeable world. At the same time, the serial works in effect nullified subject matter or object, implying that paintings could subsist without it. In this way his art demonstrated an significant precedent for the evolution of abstract painting.Monet's wife passed away in 1879; in 1892 he married his second wife, Alice Hoschedé. By 1899 his fiscal position was assured, and he started to work on his celebrated series of water lily paintings. Water lilies existed in richness in the artist's magnificent gardens at Giverny, and he painted them inexhaustibly until his end at his beloved home on Dec. 5, 1926. Monet's late years were by no means leisurely. During his last two decades he endured poor health and had double cataracts, sadly, by the 1920s he was nearly blind.
Along with his physical ailments, Monet fought urgently with the troubles of his art. In 1920 he started work on 12 large canvases, each of which measured fourteen feet in width, of water lilies, which he intended to endow to the state. To finish them, he battled against his own weakening eyesight and against the requirements of a large scale mural art for which his own past had scarcely trained him. In essence, the task necessitated him to learn a new kind of painting at the age of eighty years. The paintings are characterized by a liberal, sweeping style, nearly barren of subject matter, their large, surrounding spaces are rendered almost solely by color. Such color spaces were without precedent in Monet's life; furthermore, their descendants have appeared in modern painting solely since the end of World War II. Claude Monet Quotes
- Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.- For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.
- I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
- I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
- My life has been nothing but a failure.
- No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
- ...I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.
- People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.
- My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.
- I can only draw what I see.
- I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain. When I felt I held enough cards I determined to pass to action, and did so.
- Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens.
- It took me time to understand my waterlilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them
- I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.
- It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
- I would advise young artists . . . to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly . . . . If their painting doesn't improve by itself, it means that nothing can be done - and I wouldn't do anything!
- The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.
Claude Monet - A Selection of Noteable Works
- A Corner of the Apartment 1875- A Corner of the Studio 1861
- Autumn at Argenteuil 1873
- Bathing at La Grenouillere 1869
- Blue Water Lilies 1916-1919
- Bordighera Italy 1884
- Boulevard des Capucines 1873
- Branch of the Seine Near Giverny 1897
- Breakwater at Trouville, Low Tide 1870
- Bulbfield and Windmill Near Leyden 1886
- Camille Doncieux Lady in Green 1866
- Camille Monet at the Window 1873
- Camille Monet on Her Deathbed 1879
- Camille Monet in the Garden 1873
- cathedrale de Rouen le portail, temps gris Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal, Dull Weather
- Chemin Dans Les Bles a Pourville
- Chrysanthemums. 1878
- Cliffs at Belle-Ile. 1886
- Cliffs at Etretat 1886
- Cliffs near Dieppe 1882
- Clifftop Walk at Pourville 1882
- Coquelicots 1873
- Custom Officer's Cabin at Varengville 1882
- Dahlias 1883
- End of Summer 1890-91
- Etretat The End of the Day 1885
- Farm Courtyard in Normandy 1863
- Femme o l ombrelle tournee vers la gauche
- Fields of Bezons 1873
- Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor Le Havre 1874
- Flat Bread. 1882
- Flood at Giverny 1896
- Flowers and Fruits 1869
- Garden in Bordighera Impression of Morning 1884
- Garden in Bloom at Sainte- Addresse. c.1866
- Gare Saint Lazare
- Gare Saint Lazare the Train from Normandy 1877
- Gare Saint Lazare Paris 1877
- Gare St.Lazare 1877
- Gladioluses 1876
- Haystack at Giverny 1884-1889
- Haystack at Giverny 1886
- Haystack at the Sunset near Giverny 1891
- Haystack Snow Effects Morning 1890
- Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise 1865
- Hoarfrost, near Vetheuil 1880
- Hotel de Roches Noires Trouville 1870
- Houses at Argenteuil 1891
- Houses of Parliament London 1905
- Houses of Parliament London Sun Breaking Through the Fog 1904
- Hunting Trophy 1862
- Ice on the Seine near Bougival 1867
- Ice Thawing on the Seine The Ice Blocks near Vetheuil 1880
- Impression Sunrise
- Impression soleil levant 1873
- Impression soleil levant Impression Sunrise 1872
- Jean Monet on a Mechanical Horse. 1872
- Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden 1866
- La femme au metier 1875
- La Grenouillere 1869
- La Japonaise Camille Monet in Japanese Costume 1876
- La Promenade 1875
- La Rue de la Bavolle in Honfleur 1864
- Landscape
- Lavacourt 1880
- Le bateau atelier 1876
- Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe The Picnic 1865
- Le Grenoillare 1869
- Lemon-Trees Bordighera 1884
- Lilacs in the Sun 1873
- Lillies
- London Houses of Parliament at Sunset 1903
- London The Waterloo Bridge 1903
- Madame Gaudibert 1868
- Meadows at Giverny 1888
- Meditation Mme. Monet on a Sofa 1870-1871
- Meule Degel Soleil Couchant
- Meule Soleil Couchant 1891
- Monceau Park 1878
- Alice Hosched in the Garden 1881
- Bank of the Seine Vetheuil 1880
- Banks of the Seine 1878
- Garden at Argenteuil 1873
- Monet's Garden the Irises 1900
- Monet-The Stroll Camille Monet and Her Son Jean Woman with a Parasol 1875
- Morning Snow Effect
- Mount Kolsaas in Norway 1895
- On the Beach at Trouville 1870
- Palazzo da Mula at Venice 1908
- Path in the Ile Saint-Martin Vetheuil
- Pleasure Boat, Argenteuil 1872
- Poplars along the River Autumn 1891
- Poplars on the Epte 1891
- Poplars on the Bank of the River 1890
- Poplars on the Bank of the River 1891
- Poplars on the Epte 1891
- Port Goulpbar Belle Ile
- Portrait of Jean Monet 1880
- Portrait of Poly the Fisherman from Belle-Ile 1886
- Quai du Louvre 1867
- Red Boats. Argenteuil 1875
- Red Poppies at Argenteuil 1873
- Reflets sur l'eau 1917
- Regate a Argenteuil 1872
- Regatta at Argenteuil 1874
- Regattas at Argenteuil
- Road to the Saint-Simeon Farm 1864
- Rock Arch West of Etretat The Manneport 1883
- Roses 1923-1925
- Rough Sea at Etretat 1883
- Rough Sea at Etretat c 1868-1869
- Rue Montorgueil Paris Festival of June 30, 1878
- Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois 1866
- Saint-Lazare Station 1877
- San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice by Twilight 1908
- Seagulls The Thames Houses of Parliament 1904
- Self-Portrait 1886
- Self-Portrait 1917
- Ships at Rouen 1872
- Snow at Argenteuil 1875
- Spring 1880
- Springtime
- Steep Banks near Dieppe. 1897
- Still Life with Pears and Grapes 1880
- Storm, Coast at Belle-Ile 1886
- Sunrise 1873
- Terrace at Saint-Adresse 1867
- The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil 1880
- The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil 1881
- The Artist's Garden at Giverny 1900
- The Bark at Giverny 1887
- The Beach at Trouville 1870
- The Beach at Etretat 1883
- The Beach at Sainte-Adresse 1867
- The Boat Studio Le bateau-atelier 1876
- The Boat 1887
- The Bodmer Oak Fontainebleau Forest 1865
- The Boulevard des Capucines 1873
- The Bridge at Argenteuil 1874
- The Cape de la Have at Low Tide 1865
- The Cape Martin. 1883
- The Corner of the Garden at Montgeron 1876-1877
- The Corniche of Monaco 1884
- The Dinner 1868
- The Entrance to the Port of Honfleur 1867
- The Fields of Poppies c.1887
- The Floating Ice
- The Garden of the Infanta 1867
- The Garden of the Princess
- The Garden in Flower 1900
- The Harbour at Argenteuil 1872
- The Highway Bridge at Argenteuil 1874
- The Hotel des Roches Noires at Trouville, 1870
- The Hunt. 1876
- The Japanese Bridge 1918-24
- The Japanese Bridge 1899
- The Japanese Bridge in Giverny c.1926
- The London Harbour 1871
- The Luncheon 1868
- The Luncheon 1873
- The Magpie 1868-1869
- The Mannerportre near Etretat 1886
- The Meadow
- The Picnic 1865-1866
- The Pond at Montgeron.1876-1877
- The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil. 1873
- The Red Kerchief Portrait of Camille Monet late 1860s - early 1870s
- The Red Road near Menton 1884
- The Regatta at Argenteuil 1872
- The River,Bennecourt 1868
- The Road to Louveciennes the Effect of Snow 1870
- The Road to Vetheuil 1879
- The Robec Stream, at Rouen 1872
- The Rocks near Pourville at Ebb Tide. 1882
- The Rocks of Belle-Ile 1886
- The Rouen Cathedral at Noon 1894
- The Rouen Cathedral in the Evening 1894
- The Rouen Cathedral Portail The Albaine Tower 1893-1894
- The Seine at Argenteuil
- The Seine at Port-Villez The Harmony in Blue 1894
- The Studio Boat 1874
- The Studio Boat 1876
- The Thames at Westminster 1871
- The Thames at Westminster Westminster Bridge 1871
- The Train in the Snow. 1875
- The Tuileries 1876
- The Tuileries Study 1894
- The Waterlily Pond 1899
- The Waterlily Pond Pink Harmony, 1900
- The Waterloo Bridge The Fog 1900
- The Waterloo Bridge The Fog 1903
- The White Water Lilies 1899
- The Women in the Garden 1866-67
- The Zaan at Zaandam
- Train in the Country 1870
- Tulip Fields in Holland 1886
- Under the Lemon Trees
- Unloading Charcoal Argenteuil 1875
- Vase with Flowers 1880
- Venice. The Doge Palace 1908-1912
- Ventimiglia 1884
- Vetheuil in the Summer. 1880
- Vetheuil Setting Sun 1901
- Vetheuil 1901
- View of the Doge Palace from San Giorgio 1908
- Villas in Bordighera 1884
- Water Lilies 1906
- Water Lilies The Clouds 1903
- Water Lilies I 1905
- Water Lilies Green Reflection 1916-1923
- Water Lilies 1914
- Water Lilies 1917
- Water Lily Pond Evening
- Weeping Willow. 1919
- Wheatstacks End of Summer 1890-91
- White Poppy. 1883
- White Turkeys 1876
- Woman with a Parasol 1875
- Young Girls in a Boat 1887
- Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam 1874
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