The Life And Art Of Claude Monet Art History Explained

Claude Monet is today thought of as the archetypal impressionist artist. His paintings possess a spontaneity that fuses the act of seeing with paint, light and colour. But this apparent naturalness was hard won. Monet's early years were marked by tribulation and setback, so much so that in June of 1868, aged just 27, he stood on the edge of the Seine and considered ending his life before throwing himself in the water. He and his future wife Camille, along with their newborn child, had just been evicted, naked as a worm as he put it, from the inn where they were staying. Monet came to no harm, but it would be years before he could earn a comfortable living as a painter. He borrowed money incessantly, and it was decades before his This film tells that story. From the waters of Le Havre, where he grew up, to the lush gardens of Giverny, it traces the years of dedication behind one of the greatest artistic careers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris. At the age of five, his family relocated to the port city of Le Havre on the Normandy coast, following the death of an uncle. There, Monet's father partnered with his widowed sister-in-law, Monet's aunt, to run an import-export business serving the military. By 1854, Monet was attending the Lycée at Le Havre. He later recalled, to stay there when the sun was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was such a joy to run about on the cliffs. Art entered his life as a teenager, but he was not at first drawn to the sea as a subject matter. Instead, he put his early energies into caricature, lively, skillful sketches of school friends and local townsfolk. These sketches demonstrate an innate sense of line and form, even at this early age. One such image, made in 1858, shows a local businessman rendered with an oversized head, protruding nose and a full beard, surrounded by signs suggesting a notary or estate agent of some description. These drawings caught the attention of a local art dealer, who invited the teenager to display his work in a gallery window on the busy Rue de Paris. It was there that Monet's talent came to the notice of the local landscape artist Eugène Boudin, who lived nearby in Honfleur. Some 16 years Monet's senior, Boudin had built a successful career painting scenes of northern French coastal towns, typically beach scenes featuring Parisian families seated on chairs and shaded under parasols, a common sight since the opening of the railways had made the Normandy coast a fashionable destination in spring and summer. Boudin was among the first French artists to paint outdoors, and he instilled the idea in the young Monet. The impact was considerable. As Monet later remembered, Boudin urged him to appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky, painting constantly from nature. Monet came to view this as a period in which he first learned to understand and love the natural world. Another important encounter came through his friendship with the Dutch artist Johan Jankin, who lived between Rotterdam, Paris and Honfleur. His painting style was light and airy, with a preference for a rustic brushstroke that allowed an element of suggestiveness. Monet later recalled, and it was to him that I owed the final education of my eye. Monet returned to Paris to continue his studies. In 1859 he began attending the Académie Suisse, a life drawing studio on the banks of the Seine, by which time he was lodging in Montmartre. It was an hour's walk from the country lanes of Montmartre, where dilapidated homes stood amid orchards, small holdings and windmills, along unpaved roads, to the Académie at the corner of Boulevard de Palais. There he made new friends, Camille Pissarro, who was 10 years older than Monet, and Paul Cézanne. Yet Monet's early friendships were interrupted when, in 1861, he was conscripted into the army to serve in Algeria, during which the vivid impressions of light and colour he encountered would prove to be a lasting influence. Algeria was a splendid country, he later wrote, with constant sunshine, with hot seductive colours, you cannot imagine to what extent I increased my knowledge, and how much my vision gained thereby. Monet returned to Paris the following year after contracting typhoid, and there made the acquaintance of a new set of young painters, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. In the spring of 1863, the four artists travelled on the newly opened railway line to the countryside town of Mélun. They found themselves among the ancient woodlands and towering oaks and beaches of the Fontainebleau forest, interspersed with patches of moorland and limestone plateaus. It was here that the Barbizon group of painters, including artists like Theodor Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet, created the original rural school of painters. Before Monet, the forest encouraged him to explore subjects like trees and flora, and the way light interacted with them. In his painting The Bodmer Oak, made towards the end of a month-long stay in the forest in October 1865, the robust silhouettes of the oak branches and canopy work against strong patches of dappled light behind them. This newfound independence, and the group's sensitivity to their immediate environment, became central to the impressionist approach. Consciously distancing themselves from the quiet nostalgia that characterised the Barbizon painters who had preceded them, their early art was about prioritising the truthful perception of a place through first-hand encounters, rather than through intellectual or sentimental filters. In the summer of 1865, Monet saw Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner Soleur, and immediately recognised it, with its artificial feel, as an artwork that had breached the conventions of traditional representation. Monet was inspired and set about preparing his own monumental painting with the same title, The Luncheon on the Grass. The canvas measured a massive six metres wide by four metres tall, and was intended for the Salon of 1866. It depicted a lively picnic scene, figures arranged on a white blanket in the sunlit forest glade. However, with the Salon deadline approaching, the piece remained incomplete. Facing ongoing financial difficulties, Monet eventually cut the canvas into sections to help settle his debts. Undeterred, he quickly painted a replacement for the submission into the Salon, Camille in the Green Dress, a striking life-size portrait of his future wife. The image shows Camille standing before a dark red curtain wearing an emerald green and black-striped silk dress, with a fur-trimmed velvet jacket. Thanks to its emphasis on fashion and elegance, the piece found a place on the Salon walls and earned significant public and critical praise. Monet sold the painting for 800 francs. Buoyed by this success, he returned to working outdoors, painting Women in the Garden. Camille again posed for all of the women in the image, which Monet painted almost entirely en plein air in the grounds of a house they were renting in a Paris suburb. Unfortunately for Monet, the painting was submitted to the Salon two years running and was rejected both times. Dismissed for its loose brushwork and lack of a grand historical or mythological theme. For Monet, who was constantly borrowing money from friends to pay his debts, the future looked desperately uncertain. In July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Monet, having already served in Algeria 10 years earlier, chose to leave the country altogether, settling in London with his young family to avoid conscription. In England, Monet took the opportunity to study the recent developments in the British art scene. He was particularly drawn to the works of the landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. Turner's daring use of paint captivated Monet. His ability to render transient weather effects and prioritise atmospheric impression of a detailed depiction directly informed the work that Monet would produce in the years that followed. In 1871, Monet painted The Thames Below Westminster, a serene, boldly sparse portrayal of the River Thames with the Houses of Parliament shrouded in a warm, hazy ambulance and depicted in soft tones of grey, cream and pale blue. Monet's loose, suggestive brushstrokes emphasised the movement of the water and the impermanent quality of the light. It was also in London that Monet met the modern art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who had likewise come to England to escape the war. By the spring of 1871, Durand-Ruel was showing works by Monet and Pissarro alongside paintings by Corot, Millet and Courbet. This was an important commercial breakthrough for Monet. In the summer of 1871, after time spent in the to France. They settled in the small town of Argenteuil, not far from Paris, where they would live for the next seven years. This turned out to be one of the most crucial and productive periods of his whole life. During a brief stay in Le Havre the following year, Monet painted Impression Sunrise, a vibrant, atmospheric depiction of the harbour's southeastern edge during the early morning. The work was created from his hotel room, with the choppy brush marks serving as evidence of the speed with which it was made. A race against time as the sun rose and the light transitioned. Harbourside cranes and masts emerged through the dawn mist. The sun's warm tones stand out against the cool blues and greys of the surrounding landscape. This hazy, luminous image was a breakthrough for Monet, achieving a liberty of expression he had rarely managed before. When it was exhibited two years later at the first Impressionist exhibition, a hostile critic seized on its title and ridiculed the whole movement, calling the painters Impressionists. The name, intended as an insult, stuck. The exhibition in question was the inaugural Impressionist exhibition of 1874. The revolutionary event emerged as a direct reaction to the dominance of the official Salon. Monet, who was now approaching his mid-30s, was central to its creation, driven, like many of his artistic peers, by a growing frustration with the Salon's stranglehold on the art world. He exhibited 12 paintings, among them Impression Sunrise, and just as notably Wild Poppies. Painted in a meadow near Argentoile, the scene is dominated by a gently reclining bank dotted with red poppies, whose scattered blooms guide the eye toward a dramatic foreground, where disproportionately large flowers create a crescendo of color. The young woman with a parasol and the child accompanying her were likely modeled by Monet's wife Camille and their son Jean. During the latter years of the 1870s, Monet began concentrating on a new approach, the series painting. Rather than a single canvas of a given scene, he would return to the same subject repeatedly, under different conditions of light, season and time of day, building up a body of work that recorded the same place across the full range of its natural variation. The first of these series took the Saint-Lazare railway station as its subject, after Monet had moved to central Paris in 1877, not far from the station. Yet, despite his growing prospects, Monet's private doubts persisted. In a letter, he confessed to feeling sickened and demoralized by his life and work, and admitted he had nothing worth showing in a forthcoming exhibition. That same year brought more serious personal loss. Monet's wife Camille had fallen gravely ill and she passed away in September 1879, aged just 32. Her illness, attributed variously to cancer, tuberculosis or a mishandled abortion, had consumed much of Monet's emotional energy, as well as a significant portion of his earnings on medical care. After this tragedy, Monet's creative focus suffered. His personal life eventually found stability when he developed a relationship with Alice Hoshide in the early 1880s, a longtime friend. These circumstances played a significant part in his decision to move to in 1883, seeking a fresh chapter along Alice's six children and his own two sons. The need to produce and sell work regularly was now greater than ever. In 1890, Monet began his famous haystack series. He found his subject in a farmer's field adjacent to his home in Giverny. Building on his earlier train station works, the haystacks were painted with a deliberate intention to create a unified body of work centered on a single subject. He painted 25 versions across a summer, a winter and into the following spring of 1891. Eyewitness accounts describe him taking several canvases out into the field at once, sometimes transporting them by a wheelbarrow and moving between them as light shifted, selecting whichever half-finished painting most closely matched the A year or so later, Monet rented a makeshift studio in Rouen, facing the cathedral, where he went on to paint over 30 canvases of the same gothic facade under varying conditions of light and atmosphere. These are now considered some of his most radical paintings, leading the art historian John Berger to describe them as the final systematic proof that the history of painting would never be the same again. Now aged 53, Monet's confidence had found new heights and his professional fortunes were steadily improving too. His dealer Durand-Ruel had secured an increasingly enthusiastic audience for his work and with his reputation consolidating, Monet was able to negotiate favorable terms with competing dealers, raising his prices further. His personal life also found lasting revolution when he married Alice in 1892. With his years of itinerant living now largely behind him, Monet turned his artistic attention to the countryside immediately around Giverny. Over the following decade, he expanded the property considerably, adding a greenhouse and a large new studio. Then in February 1893, he acquired a strip of land across the neighboring railway tracks, not for building but for water. He obtained permission to divert water from the river Epte and construct two bridges. Within months, a 1,000 square meter pond and a Japanese-style wooden bridge were complete. Monet's paintings of the pond at Giverny and its water lilies constituted the most sustained single artistic endeavor of his career. Working now almost entirely on site, his canvases became progressively more expansive. When his eyesight deteriorated following an accident in 1901 and cataracts gradually obscuring his vision, he moved still further from fine detail towards near abstract panoramas. He resisted corrective surgery for many years, fearing it would alter his perception of color. When he finally underwent the procedure in 1923, having then lost the sight in one eye entirely, the results transformed his color sense once again and his late paintings reflected. In 1922, at the age of 82 and by then internationally celebrated, Monet signed an agreement to donate a series of monumental water lily paintings to the French state. These works were destined for specially redesigned galleries at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where Monet envisioned a serene and immersive installation, natural light, plain walls and minimal interior decoration. Today, eight of these vast canvases are exhibited in two oval-shaped rooms, their curved layouts enveloping visitors in sweeping panoramas. Each painting spans approximately 37 feet, creating an experience intended to draw the These works at the Orangerie represent the culmination of three decades of sustained artistic exploration. They also serve as a record of the concerns that had occupied Monet since his earliest days painting alongside Houdin on the Normandy coast. The behavior of light on water, the shifting quality of atmosphere and the challenge of capturing a transient moment in permanent paint. Claude Monet died at Giverny on the 5th of December 1926. He was 86 years old.