Between 1883 and 1908, Monet travelled to the Mediterranean and painted many landscapes and seascapes such as Bordighera. In Madrid he also admired the paintings of Velasquez.
His wife Alice died in 1911 and his son Jean died in 1914. Cataracts formed on his eyes for which he underwent two surgeries in 1923. It is interesting to note that the paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is a characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after his surgery, he was able to see only 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.
Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926, at the age of 86 and was buried in the Giverny church cemetery. His famous home and garden with its waterlily pond and bridge at Giverny are still today a popular drawcard for tourists.
© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
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Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Claude Oscar Monet was a French impressionist painter who brought the study of the transient effects of natural light to its most refined expression. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career. His painting "Impression: Sunrise" was the source for the naming of the Impressionism movement.
Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, to Adolphe and Louise-Justine Monet of 45 Rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, but his family moved in 1845 to Le Havre when he was five years old. On the first of April 1851 Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. He spent his youth in Le Havre where, in his teens, he studied drawing under Jean-Francois Ochard, but he soon developed an interest in land- and seascapes while painting outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boudin, whom he met on the beaches of Normandy. Boudin became his mentor and taught him how to use oil paints as well as the techniques for painting en plein air (outdoor).
As his style developed, however, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the interest of direct artistic expression. His experiments in rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct, sketchlike application of bright color became more and more daring, and he seemed to cut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional painter supported by the art establishment.
During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) he took refuge in England with Pissarro where he studied the work of Constable and Turner, painted the Thames and London parks, and met the art dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists.
Upon returning to France, 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 to be derogatory.
Monet's 1866 Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte), which brought him recognition, was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux. In 1870, Monet and Doncieux married and in 1873 moved into a house in Argenteuil near the Seine River. Shortly thereafter Doncieux became pregnant and bore their first child, Jean. They had another son, Michel, on March 17, 1878. Madame Monet died of tuberculosis in 1879.
He also made a series of paintings of haystacks at different times of day. It is said he took with him in a carriage at sunrise some twenty canvasses which he change from hour to hour, taking them up again the next day. He noted, for example, from nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick; at ten o'clock he passed on to another canvas and recommenced the study until eleven o'clock. Thus he followed step by step the modifications of the atmosphere until nightfall, and finished simultaneously the works of the whole series. He painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times over, and the twenty hay-stacks were all different. By exhibiting them together, one could follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history of light playing upon one and the same object.
Monet continued to travel widely, visiting London and Venice several times and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine, but his attention became increasingly focused on the celebrated water-garden he had created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely (in 1914 he had a large studio of 23 m x 12m built in the grounds of his house so he could work on the huge canvasses).
From 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but also by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley.
In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverney with his mistress, Alice Hoschedé, with whom he had begun an affair in 1876, three years before the death of his first wife. At Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris, he planted a large water garden in which he painted for the rest of his life. Monet and Hoschedé married in 1892. After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to prosper and by 1990 had achieved significant recognition and financial security to be able to purchase the property in Giverny. He would eventually stay there for 43 years and entertain many renowned artists like Cézanne and Mary Cassatt who visited him in 1894.
Despite the boldness of his colour and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, Monet was recognized as a master of meticulous observation and an artist who sacrificed neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his own feelings. In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet began "series" painting, i.e. paintings of one subject in varying light and viewpoints.
His first series is of Rouen Cathedral from different points of view and at different times of the day. He took a room above a shop in the rue Grand-Pont from which to observe the west front of the great church. Twenty views of the cathedral, ranging from dawn to sunset, were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel with great success in 1895.
On 28 January, 1857 his mother died. Then 16 years old, he left school and his widowed, childless aunt Marie-Jeanne took him into her home.
By 1859 Monet had committed himself to a career as an artist and began studying at the Atelier Suisse where he formed a friendship with Pissarro. In 1862, he entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there he met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken colour and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
Working mostly outside, Monet painted simple landscapes and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and he began to have some success at official exhibitions. His devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, "Women in the Garden". The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.giverny.org/monet/welcome.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet
http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/monet/index.html
Mauclair, Camille, The French Impressionists (1860-1900), translated by P.G. Konady.
A Project Gutenberg eBook.
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