Why Claude Monet is the typical Impressionist painter.
Monet’s relentless artistic pursuits
Claude Monet(1840-1926) became one of the most famous painters of Impressionism because of his intense observation of the essential qualities of realistic painting.
Rouen Cathedral is a prime example of this. Normally, cathedrals are a subject of majesty and reverence, but in Monet’s painting, they have a fairytale quality, like a dream palace. The Rouen Cathedral is depicted as it appears at different times of the day, different seasons, and different climatic conditions.
Another work that captures the changing light is Rouen Cathedral, which Monet wrote about while painting, “Every day I have something to add, and suddenly I see something I hadn’t seen before. I once had a nightmare all night. I once had a nightmare that the cathedral was falling down on top of me, and I could see it in blue, pink, or yellow,” he wrote to his wife. Monet set up his atelier on the second floor of the building to the left of the facade of Rouen Cathedral and devoted himself to painting the cathedral.
At one point, he worked on more than 14 canvases side-by-side at the same time, eager to capture the ever-changing harmony of light. Those moments of trying to capture that harmony of light are recreated in this exhibition in a dazzling display of brilliance. Monet is distinctly different from artists of the past in that he wanted to depict how things actually look to our eyes rather than what they are. He created a series of 39 paintings from 1892-1894, showing the Rouen Cathedral as it changes with the changing light. His intense observation and the difficulty of the creative process are evident in his letters to his wife.
Monet’s work has been influential in the history of art, but his ideas are simple. “By painting common objects, not historical or sublime natural beauty, I can find significance everywhere,” he said. This is especially evident in his Haystackes series. The painting depicts the changes in light and environment at different times of the day, which Monet hoped would show a more beautiful and comprehensive view of the environment than the surface of the façade. Monet’s ability to show the changing effects of light is often attributed to the speed with which he painted the haystacks.
Monet’s words
“The important is everywhere”
“The more I look at an object, the more difficult it is for me to transfer what I feel.
When I feel that way, I say to myself, How arrogant is the man who says he has finished a painting.
How arrogant is someone who says they’ve finished a painting?
I’m working at a faster pace, but I’m not making any progress, even to the point of exhaustion.”
Instinctive observation contrasted with the sadness of separation
Monet met Camille Doncieux, a painter and model by profession, and they fell in love and had a child two years later. But their family’s disapproval prevents them from having a wedding, and their financial support is cut off, leaving them destitute, but they continue to live a happy life. In 1879, Camille dies of uterine cancer. depicts his wife as she faces her illness and death. It is painted entirely in monochrome, with vague and indistinct figures.
Monet was a grieving husband watching his beloved wife die, but artistic inspiration took precedence over the grief of death. Shockingly, Monet observes the change of color in his dying wife’s face as it stiffens to blues and yellows. More than the sadness of separation, he was trying to capture the colors changing over time.
He remarried the woman who had cared for Camille after her death, but the guilt of having to leave her without proper medical care due to poverty prevented him from painting any more portraits.
Monet’s Water Lilies, the epitome of persistence
Take the train from Paris’s Saint-Lazare station, get off at Bagnon station, and take a 15-minute bus ride to the Giverny gardens, where the iconic Impressionist painter Claude Monet spent 43 years, from the age of 43 until his death at 86, creating a total of 500 paintings.
When Monet moved to Giverny in 1883, he set out to transform the garden into an artistic endeavor, hiring six gardeners to work with him and making the garden itself his work of art.
Until then, painters had wandered around and painted until they found a piece of nature they liked, but Monet tended and observed what he wanted to paint. He devoured the latest horticultural texts, and he bought flowers and seeds from around the world from gardening catalogs. As the years went by, the garden grew more lush, and Monet’s work became more colorful.
What’s even more remarkable is that Monet didn’t just design his gardens according to seasonal characteristics, but also according to the composition of the plants over time: some plants bloom in the morning, others are more beautiful with the morning dew, and still others give off beautiful colors at sunset. He once said that to understand his paintings, “it is better to see his own garden than to read a hundred words.”
Toward the end of his life, he was inspired by observing the changes in the reflections of the ponds in his Giverny garden and painted more than 250 Water Lilies over a period of 29 years. The series demonstrates his constant desire to harmonize painting and nature by freeing his work from conventional wisdom.
