Claude Monet: A French Impressionist
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter who supported the Impressionist movement. He was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, and passed away on December 5, 1926, in Giverny. In his latter works, Monet mastered the technique of creating series of repeated studies of the same pattern while switching out canvases based on the light or his changing interests. His photographs of haystacks (1890/91) and the Rouen cathedral (1894), for example, were part of these series that were commonly displayed in groupings. Monet built the water-lily pond at his Giverny house, which served as the model for his final body of work. His fame surged in the latter part of the 20th century, when his artwork was featured in popular commercial products and displayed in museum exhibitions that gathered record-breaking crowds.
Childhood and Early Works
Adolphe Monet (Claude’s father), a grocery store owner, moved his family to the Normandy shore, close to Le Havre. There, he took over management of the family’s successful ship-chandlering and grocery business. This incident is more than just biographically significant because Monet’s early years spent by the sea and his close understanding of the frequently changing Norman weather gave rise to his unique perspective on nature. When he was 15 years old, the sale of some well-drawn and observed portraits marked Monet’s first professional achievement. In these early years, he also created sailing ship pencil designs that were realistic and professional. Perhaps on the advice of his amateur painter aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, Claude went to a nearby artist’s studio to take a drawing class. But it wasn’t until he became friends with Eugène Boudin and was introduced to the then-uncommon practice of painting outdoors that his life as a painter truly began. The encounter gave Monet direction; for the next 60 years, he would focus on visual phenomena and the development of efficient techniques for translating perception into color.
First Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet
A wonderful but not yet Impressionist portrait of Monet’s future wife, Camille, was accepted for show in the yearly Salons, and it was exhibited there with great acclaim. However, Monet’s existence during the 1860s was insecure and nomadic, and he sold almost nothing. Monet spent the latter half of the 1860s at the Seine River resort known as La Grenouillère near Bougival, where he and Renoir first collaborated. Prior to this, he had painted in Paris, Le Havre, Chailly, Honfleur, Trouville, and Fécamp, as well as other locations between Paris and the sea. They quickly sketched pleasure seekers and bathers, rowboats bobbing in the foreground, and the shimmering reflections in the lapping water on canvases that were nearly identical in style. These sketches, which Monet regarded as “bad sketches,” served as the foundation for the Impressionist movement.
The Bougival works by both artists interpret the light and motion of outdoor life in powerful, hurried strokes that serve as analogies for visual experiences that have never before been so directly captured on paint. At Trouville, Monet painted a study of Camille on the beach in 1870 using bold, confident strokes. The fact that there are still sand grains embedded in the paint makes it the most dynamic depiction of visual realism ever created.
Monet maintained his investigation of natural occurrences as the 1870s got underway. He abandoned his kid and Camille, whom he had recently married, and went to London in order to dodge the Franco-German War. Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become his dealer, was introduced to him by Daubigny while he was there with Pissarro. He painted windmills, boats, and canals in the Netherlands in 1871 and 1872 in addition to returning to Le Havre. After his return, Monet rented a home in the Seine suburb of Argenteuil. The Impressionist movement was at its zenith during the years he lived there. In 1874, he assisted in setting up a separate exhibition of Impressionist art from the official Salon. The journalist Louis Leroy came up with the name for the group after being inspired by one of Monet’s pieces at the exhibition, Impression, Sunrise (1872).
Last Years of Claude
Monet’s search for fresh themes came to an end after 1900 with the completion of two large-scale masterpieces located distant from Giverny. The first was an elaborate multiple series depicting the River Thames, the Waterloo and Charing Cross bridges, and the Houses of Parliament for which he made at least three journeys to London between 1899 and 1904. The paintings’ unique colour palette and enigmatic romantic atmosphere are reminiscent of Turner and James McNeill Whistler’s Thames paintings. Buildings and bridges are less substantial than the pulsating brushstrokes that lend depth to the light-filled fog and mist in these paintings; mood, rather than the specifics of these structures, is Monet’s topic. The canals and palaces of Venice were the second and final architectural element Monet explored. Although he remained working on these scenes at Giverny until 1912, Monet started this series in 1908 and continued it in 1909. Venice was an ideal setting for Impressionism, although these paintings are more generalised in their depictions of light, water, movement, architecture, and water reflections than the haystack and cathedral series, which focused on more particular weather effects.
A stream of the Epte flowed through the marshes that Monet purchased in 1893, which was located across the street from his home and flower garden. He started to create a water lily garden by changing the course of this stream. A free-form pool was soon surrounded by weeping willows, iris, and bamboo. Groups of lily pads and blooms floated on the tranquil water, and a Japanese bridge concluded the piece at one end. By 1900, this one-of-a-kind creation of Monet’s imagination — an exotic lotus land inside which he was to contemplate and paint for nearly 30 years — was in itself a significant work of environmental art (since his Impressionism had evolved to become more subjective). His first paintings of lilies, water and a Japanese bridge were only a little over one square yard, but they had an unusually open composition, with the large blossoms and pads appearing to be suspended in space, and the azure water reflecting clouds, suggesting a vast environment beyond the frame.
During the years from 1915 until the artist’s death, this idea of embracing spatiality, novel to the history of painting and merely latent in the initial water lily paintings, developed into a cycle of enormous murals that were to be erected in Paris in two 80-foot oval rooms in the Orangerie of the Tuileries. In 1952, André Masson, an artist, referred to these as “the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.” The dedication of this final product of Monet’s extensive and in-depth study of nature — his attempt to capture his impressions “in the face of the most fugitive effects” — took place after his passing. The numerous enormous studies for the Orangerie murals, together with other ground-breaking and distinctive works painted in the water garden between 1916 and 1925, were mostly unknown until the 1950s but are now dispersed among the foremost private collections and museums of the entire world. Monet painted virtually all the way up until his passing in 1926, despite suffering from cataracts that affected his vision.
