SUBMITTED BY:

MR. JITENDRA THORAT

ASST.PROF IN FINE ARTS

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CLOUDE MONET

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FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST

INTRODUCTION

• Oscar-Claude Monet (1840-1926) is a famous French painter and one of the founders of the Impressionism movement along with his friends Renoir, Sisley and Bazille.
• Monet rejected the traditional approach to landscape painting and instead of copying old masters he had been learning from his friends and the nature itself. Monet observed variations of color and light caused by the daily or seasonal changes.
• He painted a same scene many times in order to capture the changing effects of lights and passing of seasons.

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OSCAR- CLAUDE MONET,

Photo by Nadar ,1899

Biography

• Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris. He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet.
•  In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
• 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.

MONET IN PARIS

• 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.
• He was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.
• In June 1861 Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for , but due to his ill health his aunt Marie intervened to get him out of the army.
• In this way he was able to complete art course at a university. 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.

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• After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Monet took refuge in England in Sep.1870. While there, he studied the works of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color.
• In the Spring of 1871, Monet's works were refused authorisation to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition.
•  Monet lived from 1871 to 1878 at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here he painted some of his best known works.In 1873 , he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
• From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism.
• Monet and Camille Doncieux had married just before the war (June 28, 1870) and, She became ill in 1876. They had a second son, Michel, on March 17, 1878, (Jean was born in 1867). At the age of thirty-two, Madame Monet died on 5 September 1879 of tuberculosis; Monet painted her on her death bed.

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FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR, IMPRESSIONISM, AND ARGENTEUIL

GIVERNY

• At the beginning of May 1883, Monet rented a house .This place have a large impact on his artworks.
•  By November 1890 Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. There he built his own studio.
•  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.
• Between 1883 and 1908, Monet traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes.
• 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. He later produced several series of paintings including: Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, the Houses of Parliament, Mornings on the Seine, and the Water Lilies that were painted on his property at Giverny.
• 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.

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Last Years

Failing sight

• During1911, Monet began to develop the first signs of cataracts.
• During World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer Georges Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of weeping willowtrees as homage to the French fallen soldiers.
• In 1923, he underwent two operations to remove his cataracts. The paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims.
• It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye; this may have had an effect on the colours he perceived. After his operations he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before.

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Death

• Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus only about fifty people attended the ceremony.

MONET`S METHOD

• Monet has been described as "the driving force behind Impressionism". Crucial to the art of the Impressionist painters was the understanding of the effects of light on the local colour of objects, and the effects of the juxtaposition of colours with each other. Monet's long career as a painter was spent in the pursuit of this aim.
• In 1856, his chance meeting with Eugene Boudin, a painter of small beach scenes, opened his eyes to the possibility of plein-air painting.
• He used bright colours in dabs and dashes and squiggles of paint. Having rejected the academic teachings of Gleyre's studio, he freed himself from theory, saying "I like to paint as a bird sings.
• Monet`s paintings were large in size and could not be completed on time.
• Monet was inspired by the art works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.
• His artworks shows opaque and sometimes translucen effects.

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Monet used quite a limited palette, banishing browns and earth colors and, by 1886, black had also disappeared. Asked in 1905 what colors he used, Monet said: "The point is to know how to use the colors, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit. Anyway, I use flake white, cadmium yellow, vermilion, deep madder, cobalt blue, emerald green, and that's all." ²

According to James Heard in his book Paint Like Monet, analysis of Monet's paintings show Monet used these nine colors:

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• Lead white (modern equivalent = titanium white)
• Cadmium yellow
• Viridian green
• Emerald green
• French ultramarine
• Cobalt blue
• Madder red (modern equivalent = alizarin crimson)
• Vermilion
• Ivory black (but only if you're copying a Monet from before 1886)

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The palette is an example of a limited palette, used by many painters, of a warm and cool of each primary color, along with white. Some painters, like Monet, will also often add the secondary color, green, to facilitate mixing landscape greens, and to use to mix with alizarin crimson to make a chromatic black.

COLORS IN MONET'S PALETTE

Monet painted on canvas which was a light color, such as white, very pale gray or very light yellow, and used opaque colors. A close-up study of one of Monet's paintings will show that colors were often used straight from the tube or mixed on the canvas. But that he also scumbled colors -- using thin, broken layers of paint that allows the lower layers of color to shine through.

Monet build up texture through his brushstrokes, which vary from thick to thin, with tiny dabs of light, adding contours for definition and color harmonies, working from dark to light.

Monet painted many subjects again and again, but every one of his series paintings is different, whether it's a painting of a water lily or a hay stack.

In October 1890 Monet wrote a letter to the art critic Gustave Geffroy about the haystacks series he was painting, saying: "I'm hard at it, working stubbornly on a series of different effects, but at this time of year the sun sets so fast that it's impossible to keep up with it ... the further I get, the more I see that a lot of work has to be done in order to render what I'm looking for: 'instantaneity', the 'envelope' above all, the same light spread over everything... I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me because I think I may make some progress in that direction..." ³

The painting of haystacks shown in this article is one of a series of paintings Monet worked on starting in late August 1890, returning to the same field and subject day after day for a year to study the effects of light during different times of day and seasons. 

MONET'S SERIES PAINTINGS

MONET'S USE OF A LIGHT GROUND

FAMOUS PAINTINGS BY CLAUDE MONET

• Impressionism emerged in France in the middle of the nineteenth century and Claude Monet is one of the pioneers of this revolutionary art movement. Claude Monet has painted some of the greatest masterpieces of Impressionism and his works has been revered by critics and people alike.

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Year: 1872

This painting is famous for giving a name to the Impressionist movement and has now become a quintessential symbol of Impressionism. It was not well taken by the critics and the term Impressionist was coined in a satirical review by Louis Leroy in which he went to the extent of saying: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” The Impressionist movement, however, soon became so popular that it spread to music and literature as well.

The subject of the painting is the harbor of Le Havre in France. It is noted for very loose brushstrokes that suggest rather than define it. Monet uses color as the main factor to capture the very essence of the scene. An interesting thing about this painting is that if you make a black and white copy of it then the sun disappears almost entirely.

 Impression, Sunrise

Water Lilies

Year: 1896 – 1926

Monet’s series of the “Nympheas” have been described as “The Sistine Chapel of Impressionism”. The series consists of approximately 250 oil paintings which were painted by Monet during the last thirty years of his life. They are now on display in museums all around the world. One of the paintings of the series was sold for 80 million at an auction in 2008.

The dazzling complexity of color and light in the “Nymphéas” panels opens the viewer’s eyes to the incredible diversity of nature and to the depth and mystery of the life it sustains. An amazing thing about these works is that Monet’s eyesight was badly deteriorating due to cataract while he painted most of these masterpieces.

Water Lilies Series Paintings

Rouen Cathedral series

Year: 1892 – 1893

This famous series captures the facade of Rouen Cathedral in France at different times of the day and year, showcasing its changes with varying light conditions. While studying these paintings it is noted that Monet broke painting tradition and cropped the subject so that only a portion of the facade is seen on the canvas. Painting the series was a difficult task for Monet. He wrote, ‘Things don’t advance very steadily, primarily because each day I discover something I hadn’t seen the day before… In the end, I am trying to do the impossible.’ He was, however, helped by his ability to capture the essence of the scene quickly and finish it later from memory.

 Haystacks Series

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Year: 1890 – 1891

Among Monet’s most notable works, the Haystacks series primarily refers to 25 canvases that he painted in the above mentioned period. The subjects of the paintings are haystacks in the fields near Monet’s home in Giverny, France which he noted during a casual walk along the countryside. The series is famous for repeating the same scene to showcase differences in perception of light across various times of day, seasons, and types of weather. These paintings made Monet the first painter to paint so many illustrations of the same subject matter

Houses of Parliament series

Year: 1900 – 1905

During his stays in London in this time period, Monet painted this series whose subject is the Palace of Westminster, home of the British Parliament. All the 19 paintings of the series are of the same size and depict the same scene from the same viewpoint but they showcase varied weather circumstances and varied times of the day. One of the paintings of the series fetched more than 20 million dollars in an auction in 2004.

Year: 1891

This famous series consists of 24 paintings of the magnificent trees along the banks of the Epte River, a few kilometers upstream from Monet’s house. A floating painting studio was moored in place and he reached there by a small boat. However, before he could finish the town wanted to auction and sell the trees, so in order to continue, Monet bought the trees and then sold them after he finished painting.

There were three types of groups for these paintings -first group was three poplars with an ‘S’ curve in the back; second group was a lot of poplars with an ‘S’ curve; third group were poplars with their reflections. A crucial element of the paintings was the ‘S’ curve that was outlined by the top of the trees; although it made critics term the paintings too decorative initially, as time passed the ‘S’ curve became a highlight and selling point for the paintings.

Poplar Series

Year: 1866

This is the painting that first brought recognition to Monet. It fetched Monet 800 francs, a great amount for a struggling artist at that time. It features his first wife Camille Doncieux in a green dress. Camille features in several other paintings by her husband, including, Women in the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt. The painting is from the early period of Monet’s career when he painted in realist style as opposed to Impressionist

Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress

Woman with a Parasol

Year: 1875

One of his earlier works, this painting depicts his first wife Camille Doncieux with their elder son Jean. Camille is holding a parasol or a light umbrella and it seems that she is catching a glimpse of someone looking at her. The painting is early evidence of Monet focusing more on light and color as opposed to line and shape.

Claude Monet was the leader of the French Impressionist movement, literally giving the movement its name. As an inspirational talent and personality, he was crucial in bringing its adherents together. Interested in painting in the open air and capturing natural light, Monet would later bring the technique to one of its most famous pinnacles with his series paintings, in which his observations of the same subject, viewed at various times of the day, were captured in numerous sequences of paintings. Masterful as a colorist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.

Conclusion

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