THE IMPRESSIONIST PAR EXCELLENCE

Claude Monet
Date 1899
Author Gaspar-Félix Tournachon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Claude Monet (French pronounced [klod mɔnɛ]) also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and 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. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.
On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.
He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
When Monet traveled to Paris to visit The Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Monet, having brought his paints and other tools with him, would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.
Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at universities, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
Monet's Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition, and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Woman in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868.

The women in the Garden
Oil on canvas, 1866-1867
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
This image is courtesy of the Art Renewal Center

The Beach At Sainte-Adresse
Oil on canvas, 1867
Private collection
This image is courtesy of the Art Renewal Center

In 1867-68, Claude Monet made a lot of marinas around the harbour of Le Havre especially at Sainte-Adresse beach.
In this one the way Claude MONET painted the sky reminds of the influence Eugène Boudin had in his first years.
(© A. Cauderlier, 38 route de Giverny 27200 Vernon France)
Monet lived from December 1871 to 1878 at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here he painted some of his best known works. In 1874, he briefly returned to Holland.
In 1872 (or 1873), he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended as disparagement but which the Impressionists appropriated for themselves.

Impression, Sunrise
Oil on canvas, 1873
Private collection
This image is courtesy of the Art Renewal Center

The Luncheon (Monet's Garden At Argenteuil)
Oil on canvas, 1873
Private collection
This image is courtesy of the Art Renewal Center

"The Luncheon" reflects the family happiness at Argenteuil. A quiet summer afternoon, Jean Monet is sitting on the ground and playing, Camille appears in the background.

At the age of thirty-two, Madame Monet died on 5 September 1879 of tuberculosis; Monet painted her on her death bed. After several difficult months following the death of Camille on 5 September 1879, a grief-stricken Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began in earnest to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880s Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings.
While Monet continued to live in the house in Vétheuil; Alice Hoschedé helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children. They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880 Alice Hoschedé and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet still living in the house in Vétheuil. In 1881 all of them moved to Poissy which Monet hated. From the doorway of the little train between Vernon and Gasny he discovered Giverny.
In April 1883 they moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hoschedé married Claude Monet in 1892.
Monet and his large family rented a house and 2 acres (8,100 m2) 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 an endless array of 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.
Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, through the end of his life in 1926, Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1890-91, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
Source: Scanned from Stuckey, Charles F.,
The Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson.
Author Original uploader TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wheatstacks
1890-91, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
Source: Scanned from Stuckey, Charles F.,
The Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson.
Author Original uploader TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wheatstacks (Sunset, Snow Effect)
1890-91, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
Source: Scanned from Stuckey, Charles F.,
The Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson.
Author Original uploader TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wheatstack (Snow Effect, Overcast day)
(Meule, effet de neige, temps couvert)
1890-91, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
Source: Scanned from Stuckey, Charles F.,
The Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson.
Author Original uploader TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wheatstack
1890-91, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
Source: Scanned from Stuckey, Charles F.,
The Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson
Author Original uploader TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wheatstack (Sun in the Mist)
1891, Oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Source: Scanned from Stuckey, Charles F.,
The Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson.
Author Original uploader TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

With the Monet Haystacks series, started in the late summer of 1890 and completed the following spring, Monet entered on a new period in his work. For the next thirty years he was able to concentrate almost exclusively on a few subjects: Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, the Waterlilies. What interested him henceforth was the expression of transient appearances – the motif itself would be unvarying and viewed always from the same angle, only the light would change, depending on the season, the weather and the time of day.
His method was to work on several canvases at once, devoting perhaps no more than a few minutes at a time to any one of them. It was necessary to work swiftly to capture the ‘moment’ before it dissolved. In this he was greatly assisted by his stepdaughter Blanche, who would slide the canvases into position on his easel.
On 7 October, in full flight, he wrote to Gustave Geffroy: “…the further I get, the more I see how much work it will need to convey what I am searching for: ‘instantaneity’, and above all the external ‘envelope’, the same light spread everywhere…”
The series of 25 Monet Haystacks canvases was completed by the end of the winter of 1891. Some 15 of these were exhibited by Durand-Ruel in May. For the first time there was no hostile reaction, only unanimous praise. Gustave Geffory’s preface to the exhibition catalogue is a string of hyperboles, but it also contains a sensitive account of these ‘haystacks in an empty field’.
The Monet Haystacks series had a marked influence on the younger painters, particularly the Fauves, Derain and Vlaminck. For Kandinsky, seeing examples in Moscow, and later in Munich, was one of the decisive experiences of his life. He wrote in his memoirs: “What suddenly became clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, which I had not understood before and which surpassed my wildest dreams”.
The success of the Haystacks series solved Monet’s problems at a stroke: most of the Haystacks canvases were sold for as much as 1,000 francs, and Monet’s prices in general began to rise steeply. This financial coup enabled him to buy outright the house and grounds at Giverny and to start constructing a waterlily pond.
(From impressionist-art-gallery.com)
He later produced several series of paintings including: Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, the Parliament, Mornings on the Seine, and the Water Lilies that were painted on his property at Giverny.

The Four Trees
Four Poplars,1891
Banks of the Epte River near Giverny)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Poplars (Autumn)
1891
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Poplars (Autumn)
1891
Philadelphia Museum of Art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Poplars (Wind effect)
Year 1891
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Trouée de soleil dans le brouillard
Houses of Parliament, London
Sun Breaking Through the Fog, 1904
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Source The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monet used color with an increasing freedom in these later years. London as he saw it again at the beginning of the present century suggested chromatic richnesses far beyond any he had contemplated in 1871. This view of the Houses of Parliament in 1904 with the sun coming through fog departed from the Whistlerian silhouette of thirty-three years before to picture densities of purple and blue with a contrast of gold that already forecast André Derain's fauve paintings of the city.

Houses of Parliament, London
Palace of Fine-Arts, Lille, France
1904
Author Remi Jouan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All of these paintings were done on identical sizes of canvas, from the same viewpoint overlooking the Thames from Monet's window. This series is the supreme expression of his conception of an "envelope" of interactive colored light. By providing a static subject under different light conditions, the series paintings illustrate how the changing "envelope" transforms what we perceive. This final painting of the series, however, differs from the first seven. It is titled without the additional clause used in the others to describe the momentary condition of the envelope, such as "...Sun Breaking Through the Fog" or "...Effect of Sunlight". In the earlier works, the buildings and river are inert, passively affected by the envelope of light. Here they take center stage with fantastically dynamic form. The spiraling brushstrokes of the tower sweep it upward majestically, seeming to draw contrails of the envelope into its vortex. The river, too, takes on a more aggressive aspect, the highlighted wavecrests creating a groundswell at the base of the tower that contributes to the rising effect. As the tower stretches toward the bright sky at the very pinnacle of the canvas, Monet succeeds masterfully in expressing a dazzling sense of supreme aspiration.
(© 19 Sep 2002, Nicolas Pioch at ibiblio.org)
Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own gardens in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine, producing paintings such as Break-up of the ice on the Seine.
He wrote daily instructions to his gardening staff, 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. He remained its architect, even after he hired seven gardeners. He built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building, well lit with skylights.
Between 1883 and 1908, Monet traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, such as Bordighera. He painted an important series of paintings in Venice, Italy, and in London he painted two important series—views of Parliament and views of Charing Cross Bridge. His second wife Alice died in 1911 and his oldest son Jean, who had married Alice's daughter Blanche, Monet's particular favourite, died in 1914. After his wife died, Blanche looked after and cared for him. It was during this time that Monet began to develop the first signs of cataracts.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
From 1914 to 1915 Monet decided to build a large studio at Giverny: 23m x 12m, at the top of the garden, on the left side. He wanted to make his dream come truth: to create The Water Lilies (Decorations des Nympheas).
He started this series of paintings in 1916 and had painted them till 1926. Monet worked on twelve large canvases. In 1918 he donated them to France, following the signing of the Armistice. These paintings were installed in an architectural space designed specifically for them – two oval rooms - at the museum of the Orangerie in Paris.

Water Lilies, 1920-1926
Musée de l'Orangerie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sea-Roses (Yellow Nirwana), 1920
National Gallery London
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Water-Lilies, 1914-1917
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Water Lily Pond, 1908
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Water Lilies, 1906, Art Institute of Chicago
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Water Lilies (or Nympheas) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926). The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted as Monet suffered from cataracts.

The Waterlily Pond
Oil on canvas
National Gallery, London
This image is courtesy of the Art Renewal Center

Monet's 'Le bassin aux nympheas' (Water Lily Pond), measuring about two metres in width, is one of Monet's most important works from his series in 1904 of water lilies, pond and bridge, painted at his property at Giverny. With a strong interest in controlled nature Monet became infatuated with light and reflection on water and this particular painting was one of four large scaled paintings signed 1919 that used the water's surface like a mirror, reflecting clouds and foliage.
During this time Monet suffered cataracts and a lot of his earlier water lily paintings had an orange tint which was characteristic of cataract sufferers. After treatment Monet spent time actually re-painting some of these earlier works introducing much deeper bluer colours to the water.
Unlike most of Monet's late work, which remained unfinished in the studio when he died, Le Bassin Aux Nympheas was released by the artist during his lifetime. The remaining three have all found different homes over the years with one being kept in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, another in a private collection and the third unfortunately being cut in two before the Second World War.
'Le bassin aux nympheas' was initially expected to sell for up to £18million to £24million but stunned the art world yesterday when it sold for more than twice that amount by an anonymous buyer at Christies' in London.
(Article courtesy of The Laura Henry Collection - 25th June 200
In 1923 Monet was nearly blind and had an operation from cataract in one eye. His sight improved after that.
At the beginning of the year 1926, in February Monet had still painted, but he had suffered from lung cancer. On December 5, 1926 Monet died at Giverny at the age of 86. He was buried in a simple ceremony in his family grave in Giverny church cemetery. His friend Georges Clemenceau attended the ceremony.
(Copyright © 2006-2009 Alvilim)

Welcome to Claude Monet's
From giverny.org/monet/welcome.htm