Chapter Six
CLAUDE MONET &
The Impressionist Landscape
CONTENTS
Introduction
6.1
6.2
6.3
Claude Monet, Eugène Boudin and Normandy
6.4
Argenteuil and the Advent of Impressionism
6.5
Impressionism: A Critical Concept
6.6
Landscape and the Legacy of Romanticism
6.7
6.8
Paint Tubes and Portable Easels: Monet’s Modern Palette
6.9
6.10
6.11
The Garden at Giverny and the Influence of the Orient
6.12
6.13
Water Lilies as Immersive Experience
INTRODUCTION
Impressionism gave artists the liberty to experiment. Freed from narrative content and pictorial restraints, Impressionists such as Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and others established an art movement focused on the spontaneous and objective observation of the immediate world around them.
Their subjects were diverse, ranging from street scenes, café concerts, bourgeois interiors, waterscapes, cityscapes, and portraiture, but the informal group of nineteenth-century radical artists shared a common goal: to break from the strictures of French art academic institutions by adopting innovative approaches to art-making, and new ways by which to bring their work to public attention. They went out of their ateliers to find their subjects, looked to light, atmosphere, and colour to create their canvases, and organized independent exhibitions to show them.
Claude Monet was a central figure in the movement, devoting his life to pursuing the transformative potential of light outdoors. His revolutionary plein air paintings altered how landscape painting was approached, conveyed, and perceived. His technique of building images through colour patches dabbed side by side, or passages of sheer, light-filled washes, produced sensory optical compositions that radically departed from the established norm. Monet aimed to depict the seen world as experienced on the retina’s surface rather than to describe an illusion of the known world of space, mass, and contextual detail.
This chapter will consider the evolutionary course of Monet’s naturalistic approach and his unique contribution to the Impressionist movement. In the early stages of his career, Monet was influenced by Romanticist painters like Eugène Delacroix and Camille Corot. Delacroix’s expressive use of color and Corot’s sensitivity to nature left a lasting impression on Monet’s artistic sensibilities. Additionally, Monet’s association with the older artist Eugène Boudin, who was known for his seascapes and beach scenes, played a crucial role in shaping his early interest in capturing the effects of light on water. The influence of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints is also noteworthy, as Monet incorporated elements of their composition and use of colour into his own work. We will trace the development of his luminous, open-air paintings in works produced along the Channel coast in Normandy, at Argenteuil and on the banks of the Seine River, and his interest in recording perceptual processes in the serial works of Rouen and Giverny, culminating with his water landscapes, his chef-d’oeuvre, the Water Lilies, of which he once remarked: “One instant, one aspect of nature contains it all….”
6.1
| Beyond the Atelier
Claude Monet was twenty when he painted A Corner in the Studio, his only studio scene and an anomaly within the context of his celebrated plein air practice. Nonetheless, this intimate, unusual canvas contains elements that hint at the artist’s developing stylistic concerns and his eventual embrace of the impressionist landscape.
In contrast to the artist’s later open air images, this interior scene is crowded and close. It is busily animated by a patterned oriental carpet and the large, landscape-like design elements of the florid wallpaper. The room is further filled by a table laden with books, brushes, a paintbox, and a palette loaded with colours poured straight from a tube. A red chéchia, a style of North African hat, lies casually on the table’s edge, and a shotgun leans against it. An 1850s-style French landscape hangs on the wall beside antique weaponry. While Monet’s awareness of orientalist vocabularies is discernible, the palette is his own, and the romanticism of the pictured landscape alludes to his early and abiding love of his native France.
Mary-Dailey Desmarais, in “Rethinking the Origins of Impressionism: The Case of Claude Monet and A Corner of a Studio” (Companion to Impressionism, André Dombrowski, and Dana Arnold, eds. Wiley Blackwell, 2021, 27-42) discusses the significance of this early painting and the unexpected insights it provides about Monet within the context of the origins of Impressionism. She writes,
The unframed landscape on the wall has been identified as a painting by Charles-François Daubigny, which Monet claimed to have found “among the rubbish piled up in the corners” of his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre’s house in Le Havre, the seaside town where he spent his youth. Daubigny’s landscape seems to acknowledge Monet’s early admiration for, and debt to, Barbizon landscape painting.
Likewise, the paintbox on the desk is a portable one used to paint outdoors. In 1861, Monet had just purchased his first paintbox of this sort for his earliest plein air painting excursions in Le Havre with Eugène Boudin. What appears to be the back of a small canvas inside the box is one that would have been used for painting sketches en plein air on just such occasions. Meanwhile, the tapestried landscape on the wall suggests that Monet was already envisioning landscape as a room in unwitting anticipation of the studio he would cultivate outdoors in his garden in Giverny – and of his late water-lily paintings, which now span the walls of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Corner of a Studio would thus seem to chart in advance the well-understood progression in Monet’s practice from studio painting to the plein air sketch, from ébauche to décoration. But Corner of a Studio also contains the seeds of a Monet much more unexpected, complicating received wisdom about the origins of Impressionism. It is generally understood that Impressionism was the natural outgrowth of the Realists’ objective to depict contemporary subject matter – in the words of Gustave Courbet, “real and existing things” – coupled with a preference for the spontaneity of painting on-the-spot, or en plein air, which developed primarily from the example of the Barbizon School. Impressionism, or so the story goes, privileged the seen over the felt, the outdoors over the interior, the moving over the still. Corner of a Studio can help us to see that Impressionism, at least for Monet, was a much less binary endeavor.
Monet’s inclusion of objects besides the tools of painting may indicate the importance he placed on historical and art historical influences. The books, weapons, and North African accoutrements make reference to the important Romanticist Eugène Delacroix, an idol of Monet’s. According to Desmarais,
Monet also liked to recount how, together with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he would spy on Delacroix while working from a neighboring studio on the rue de Furstemberg in the early 1860s. Given Monet’s admiration for the older artist Delacroix, we might imagine the weapons embedded in the landscape in Monet’s picture as a distant evocation of what critics described as the “battle” between Delacroix and his rival, Jean-Dominique Ingres, dueling it out for the forces of color and line, respectively. If this is so, then the spotlit colors on the palette and the absence of drawing tools on the table in Corner of a Studio seem to be clear signs that Monet came down on the side of color.
Monet’s early palette, as seen in Corner of the Studio, bears similarities to the deep, vibrant palette of Delacroix’s battle paintings. The younger artist would have been familiar with Delacroix’s distinctive tonal choices evidenced for example in The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha, which he saw at Martinet’s gallery in 1860.
In addition to its Romanticist colour affinities, Corner of a Studio points to Monet’s early references to orientalist motifs and subjects. As Desmarais has noted, the chéchia had become an orientalist fashion trend in Paris, popular with Delacroix and others of his generation. It becomes more relevant here, given that Monet had been drafted into the army on March 2nd, 1861, joining the ranks of the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a cavalry corps stationed in Algeria. Most of all, the work exemplifies the importance Monet placed on direct observation and his early debt to the orientalist imagination of romanticism.
In its intimations and references, Corner of a Studio warns against simplistic stylistic categorizations, a matter Gustave Courbet had addressed in his Realism Manifesto:
… Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary. … I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of “art for art’s sake.” No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality. To know in order to do, that was my idea.
As Desmarais summarizes, “In the small space of the studio corner, Monet condenses the larger lesson of Courbet’s Studio: landscape painting need not only be one thing or the other, only fact or fantasy, the imagined or the real. Corner of a Studio works hard to sustain the possibility that these realms coexist in the context of landscape painting.”
Monet’s approach to the transient qualities of landscape was, therefore, not just stimulated by what was before him, but was also the product of imagination and his discerning perception.
In the spring of 1865, at twenty-five, Monet started his monumental canvas, Luncheon on the Grass (Déjeuner sur l’herbe). Measuring 4.65 x 6.40 m, it celebrated large-scale plein air painting nine years before Impressionism was an official movement. At the same time, it referenced history by portraying a site charged with the legacy of French landscape painting: the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Monet intended to paint a modern subject in the grand format customarily reserved for history paintings, portraying a group of contemporaries picnicking outdoors. He also wanted to pay tribute to Édouard Manet, whose 1863 Le Bain (renamed Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1867) stirred controversy when it was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863.
The picnic scene was intended to be three times larger than Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, but Monet could not complete the project, abandoning it a year after its start. A few fragments are preserved at the Musée d’Orsay, and several studies survive, including one at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which, other than a few details, is the most faithful to the original painting imagined by Monet.
In the Moscow study, Monet’s interest in the ephemeral quality of light outdoors is in full evidence. Minute dots of colour convey the dappled spread of light outdoors, the dazzle of the white tablecloth, and the scintillating leaves on the trees add to the alfresco feel. Monet’s use of broad strokes and loose brushwork further the sense of the spontaneity of the everyday scene. The figures portrayed were Monet’s friends, including the painters Bazille and Renoir, and Monet’s mistress and later wife, Camille Doncieux. They seem immersed in the landscape, animated by dancing shadows and lights. The easy atmosphere among them echoes the naturalism of their surroundings.
Monet’s Pavé de Chailly in the Fontainebleau Forest, painted the previous year, is equally naturalistic. The woodland path draws the viewer in, while the billowy clouds and play of sun and shadows, leaves and grass engage our gaze. The empty landscape was likely a preliminary canvas for the larger Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, providing a background study for placing the figures in the forest clearing beneath the right tree.
6.2
| Controversial Style
Gustave Courbet visited Monet’s studio as the artist was struggling to complete his Déjeuner sur l’herbe for the 1866 Salon. Realizing the challenge of the task, Courbet suggested he paint another “quickly and well, in a single go,” so he would have a work to submit to the jury. Monet’s Camille [Woman in the Green Dress] was that painting. It is a life-size portrait of Camille-Léonie Doncieux, realistic in its use of dark vibrant colours and attention to detail.
Camille-Léonie Doncieux was still in her teens when she began to pose for Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet. She became Monet’s mistress and, later, his first wife. They married on June 28th, 1870, two years after the birth of their first son. Camille was more than Monet’s model mistress and wife; she was his lifelong muse who inspired his paintings, his gardens and his aesthetic direction.
An ode to elegance, Camille wears a striped emerald-green and black silk dress under a black fur-trimmed jacket. She has yellow leather gloves and a dark capote decorated with feathers as accessories. Her hair is in a bun tied with black ribbons at the nape of her neck. Long brownish-red curtains provide a rich backdrop to her refined and chic figure.
There is captivating movement in the composition itself, in the sweep of the dress, the play of the folds in the skirt, and the tilted position of the head. But a sense of interiority permeates the space; Camille’s eyes are downcast, the lighting is diffused, and without an obvious source, it surrounds Camille, highlighting her face, hand and skirt.
Camille is thought to have been completed in four days. It was accepted and shown at the Paris Salon, gaining the relatively unknown Monet some positive attention, and some judgment.
The critic, Theophile Thoré, described the painting as “a large portrait of a standing woman seen from behind trailing a magnificent green silk dress, as dazzling as the fabrics painted by Veronese.” But, his suggestion that the woman had been “gathering violets” implied that her elegant dress was intended to attract male admirers and that she was a woman of questionable morality.
The professional relationship between Monet and Camille Doncieux, his model and muse, is a principal theme of Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010) by psychologist and art historian Mary Matthews Gedo. In her analysis, Gedo observes that the model’s dynamic pose, as much as her fashionable ensemble, conveys the stylish elegance of the modern Parisienne. Emphasizing Camille’s intuition and professional skills, Gedo contends that Monet’s companion defined the role of the contemporary artist’s model. Camille was not simply a traditional muse but actively contributed to Monet’s development as a figure painter.
Gedo compares Camille [Woman in the Green Dress] with La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume), shown in the Salon exhibition in 1876:
Most certainly [Monet] did not intend – as Whistler presumably had – to create a convincing fusion of visual and stylistic elements of East and West, for the painting seems to parody both Western art and Japanese prints with equal freedom.
Monet, who owned numerous prints of courtesans . . . must have been well aware that woodblock artists characteristically represented courtesans . . . with rather impassive facial expressions far removed from the “come-hither” smile Camille wears in La Japonaise.
Every aspect of the painting – from the exaggerated realism, to the fierce little fellow embroidered on the kimono’s visible right-side panel, to the agitated movements of the uchiwa, to Camille’s blond wig and simpering expression – suggests that the composition was created in a spirit of raillery … reminding us that Monet began his juvenile career as a caricaturist.
The intense controversy generated by Madame Monet Wearing a Kimono (La Japonaise) caused Monet to attempt to remove it from public access. Likely, it was Monet’s parody of Eastern and Western artistic conventions: the Japanese fans and costume juxtaposed with Camille’s blonde wig, which caused provocation, especially in tandem with a pose reminiscent of courtesans’ seductive posturing found in the Japanese prints that Monet collected.
Somewhat ironically, four years after the publication of Gedo’s Monet and his Muse in 2014, Camille (Woman in the Green Dress) was presented as an impressionist fashion statement in the exhibition Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” one of the first shows to examine how the Impressionists used fashion to communicate notions of the ‘modern.’
Gloria Groom curated the exhibition for the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Janet Whitmore, in her exhibition review “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” (in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring14/whitmore-reviews-impressionism-fashion-and-modernity) describes an installation at the Metropolitan Museum entitled “Monet’s Camille: Reimagining the Full-Length Portrait”:
The floor was now carpeted and the wall color shifted to a deep red. Arsène Houssaye’s statement in an 1869 edition of L’Artiste was stenciled on the introductory partition wall: “La Parisienne is not in fashion, she is fashion.” [Arsène Houssaye, bought the painting for 800 francs]. This sentiment sums up the perspective that was explored throughout the exhibition. Why was Paris fashion such a key element in defining ‘modern life’, and how did this phenomena influence the art, the artists and the women who modeled the fashions for them at the time? …No one was a more consistent model for the Impressionists than Camille Doncieux, Claude Monet’s mistress and wife, who is shown not only in her husband’s paintings, but in numerous works by Renoir and Manet. Certainly, her role as the model for The Woman in a Green Dress (1866, Kunsthalle, Bremen) shown at the Salon of 1866 brought her unwelcome notice as critics parsed the possible meanings of the green dress, including the presumed social status of the then obscure model.
Gloria Groom’s exhibition catalogue, also titled Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity (Art Institute of Chicago, 2012) contains nine special sections that highlight specific paintings. The first of these is Groom’s multi-faceted discussion of the Woman in a Green Dress, encompassing everything from the possible source of the original dress to the reasons why Monet chose to paint a full-length portrait, but then failed to provide a name for the model until the last minute. Groom’s discussion of the fashion context of this dress is used to explain why critics considered this painting to be so unusual when it was shown at the Salon. The gown failed to provide sufficient visual cues about either the model or her position in society, thus creating an unresolvable ambiguity about Camille’s social status. As Groom points out in her analysis of Joris-Karl Huysman’s commentary on Impressionist painting, “One wonders how Huysmans would have judged Monet’s Camille, neither trollop nor grande dame, whose true modernity resides in her dress—the fashion and the fit—and the multiple readings of the model it provided.”
In contrast, on the opposite side of the partition wall from Woman in a Green Dress was Monet’s portrait, Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert. This was strictly a private commission, which the artist painted in a more conventional style, following the tradition of detailing the luxurious materials used in the gown and the domestic setting. In this case, there could be no doubt about Mme Gaudibert’s social position or her fashionable elegance.
6.3
| Claude Monet, Eugène Boudin and Normandy
Monet traveled to Normandy to paint in the 1860s as he would throughout his career, continually inspired by the unique light and atmosphere of the northern coast. Camille and Claude honeymooned at Trouville-sur-Mer in 1870, a seaside resort town in Normandy on the English Channel developed by wealthy Parisians and foreign tourists. Camille would pose for him on several occasions during this pivotal summer in Monet’s career, including The Beach at Trouville, a work that stimulated his forward direction as a painter of the everyday.
Susan D. Greenberg writes in “The Face of Impressionism in 1870: Claude Monet’s Camille on the Beach at Trouville” (Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2001): 66-73):
Camille turns to face Monet as she casually balances a parasol on her shoulder; Monet in turn paints an informal sketch of his wife relaxing at the beach. This aura of apparent casualness is in fact carefully constructed, and arises only after Monet has faced countless decisions and formidable challenges within the limited time span of one sitting: How could he convey the informality of his leisure subject in terms of form and style? How could he represent the transient sensory environment of the seashore surrounding him – the movement of wind, water, sun, and clouds – within the framed and static medium of painting?
Boudin’s work offered Monet a frame-work in which to expand, as Parisian art critics in the 1860s had acknowledged Boudin’s views of the bourgeoisie along the shore as a novel, hybrid genre. Such lively everyday scenes offered a fresh alternative to traditional subjects of history and religion, and embodied the sort of modern-life subject encouraged by the art critic Charles Baudelaire in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.”
Boudin considered the critical recognition of his “little studies of the fashionable beaches” in a letter to the dealer Pierre-Firmin Martin in 1868: “These gentlemen congratulated me for . . . daring to depict in painting the people and things of our times . . . The idea is catching on, and a number of young painters, led, I would say, by Monet, find that it is a genre greatly underrated up to now. The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jacque, Breton; and that is a good thing. These painters produce serious works, they are involved in God’s creation, and they continue it by helping its manifestation in a fruitful way for mankind. Well and good: but, between you and me, the bourgeois, walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas.”
Beach at Trouville exemplifies the beginnings of Monet’s carefully formulated colour theory and technique. He first used an imprimatura to create a uniform tone across the canvas. He treated his ground with an underlayer of medium warm gray consisting of white mixed with traces of ivory black and chrome yellow. The luminous underpainting provided a subtle warm tone which enhanced his colour effects. In some areas, the canvas is left unpainted, the bare bits employed as descriptive elements, indicating parts of a dress, a puff of clouds, or a pictorial interlude.
Monet used his innovations in colour optics to augment the effects of his palette. He created chromatic contrasts, for example, placing reds next to greens, to intensify pigmentation and to allow each colour to reflect different tonalities in different areas. The lavender tone of the parasol in The Beach at Trouville is placed almost directly next to a yellow ochre flower in Camille’s bonnet, creating a strategic juxtaposition of cool and warm tonalities.
Here we see the beginnings of Monet’s use of unique touches of colour to capture the ways light changes the formal elements of a given scene. He organizes the composition in order to effectively explore the shifting dimensions he is interested in depicting. The upper and lower portions of sky and sea are sparsely coloured and detailed, leaving the artist to concentrate on the ocean and Camille. As Greenberg describes,
For her dress, he applies broad strokes and dabs of white and tan, with a touch of the pink from the sailboat beyond. He focuses on the more distinguishing areas of head and torso and only hints at her full skirt, which is not quite a skirt, but the barest grouping of outlines and markings. For the sea, Monet uses choppy marks of an elegant, classical green, which becomes a sunnier blue-green closer to the horizon. Expressive white strokes and dabs convey swirls of sea foam and splashing waves. Ingeniously, a line of simple dots are swimmers in the distance; Monet is pressed for time; he has to get it all in one sitting. The dots are like an ellipsis, and seem to say, “… you get the point.” Thus, Monet is efficient and economical with his paint. His sense of measure is especially evident, however, in the use of gray priming laid over the canvas to inflect the applied paint. These contrasting gray areas emphasize and set off his touches of color. Gray seas appear cool in contrast to the surrounding greens shimmering in the sunlight; back on land, these tones appear warmer next to the tans and cool whites of Doncieux’s dress. Monet is keenly aware of the effect created by these areas of absent paint. Such gaps also create meaning, as in the band of gray running between the ocean’s white surf and the sand, an interlude explaining that water has not yet met land, and conveying in a broader sense the temporal aspect of the sea’s back-and-forth motion.
6.4
| Argenteuil and the Advent of Impressionism
Monet went to England and the Netherlands during the Franco-Prussian War (July 19, 1870 – May 10, 1871). When he returned, it was to a Paris destroyed by the war, a shock that influenced his decision to move to the suburb of Argenteuil.
The Highway Bridge Under Repair was Monet’s first painting of the bridges near Argenteuil destroyed during the conflict. The river is framed by scaffolding and beams, a reminder of ruination in the wake of the war, when the bridge was destroyed by retreating French troops. But the rafters and scaffolding here also stand as signs of reconstruction and as a testament to France’s ambition to rebuild.
From December of 1871 until the autumn of 1878, Monet and his family lived in a rented gardened house in Argenteuil, on the banks of the Seine, eleven kilometres to the northwest of Paris and a fifteen-minute train ride from the capital’s Gare Saint-Lazare. With its scenic vistas unmarred by urban industrialization, Argenteuil was a source of inspiration for Monet, who painted prolifically while there: river views, bridges, streets, and gardens.
Monet’s house became a meeting place for his fellow artists, Renoir and Sisley among them. Its topographical diversity appealed to their varied interests and offered opportunities to explore the outdoor effects of light and colour, the Impressionists’ future hallmark. This period marks the beginnings of the Impressionist movement and the planning of the group’s first exhibition in 1874.
On one of his many visits, Renoir painted Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil. It shows Monet at his portable easel before a hedge of multicoloured dahlias. The focus is on the sensory aspects of the scene, light, colour, and nature, yet despite the lack of descriptive detail, Monet is fully recognizable by his signature dark jacket and round hat.
The canvas evocates the friendship and professional rapport between Renoir and Monet in the early 1870s. Naturally drawn to subjects of people, Renoir’s domestic landscape is a deliberate portrayal of Monet as an Impressionist artist, underscoring his devotion to the twin principles of working outdoors and painting his immediate surroundings.
Renoir’s lively brushwork and the brilliance of his palette are scintillating. Despite the strict organization of the background: the stark, blue-roofed houses standing out against an opaque sky, Renoir focuses on the exuberant profusion of dahlia bushes barely contained by the palisade. The general oblique line suggesting the top of the hedge leads one’s eye to the painter’s standing silhouette. Renoir’s textured technique here, with the image constructed from a succession of rapid and nervous strokes typical of Impressionism and an essential stylistic characteristic of both painters, suggests that each moment, or each stroke, is a registration of a new observation of reality.
Thomas B. Cole, in Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (JAMA 305, no. 23 (2011): 2384), contrasts Renoir’s painting with Monet’s rendition of the same subject:
On an overcast day in the outskirts of Paris, a painter stands at an easel by a rustic fence, facing a thicket of red, white, and yellow dahlias. … Overlooking the pyramidal mass of vegetation to his right are several substantial houses topped with double-sloped roofs and dormer windows in the Second Empire style. Monet is outfitted for an expedition into the countryside, with paint box, palette, brushes, parasol, and portable easel, but in fact he is only a few steps from his house—the cream-colored one with blue window shutters on the left… In Monet Painting in His Garden, Renoir has emphasized the features of a suburban neighborhood, with plenty of open space for informal gardens. From where the painter in the picture stands, he can see several houses.
By contrast, a painting made by Monet looking in the same direction excludes the neighboring houses, so that only his own is visible in a forest of dahlias. Monet’s version looks less like a neighborhood than a country estate.
The image of Camille in the Monets’ garden was a much-loved and reoccurring subject of the artist’s Argenteuil paintings. The motif also traces the evolution of Monet’s technical approach. In the early 1870s, Monet’s stylistic penchant for individuated brushstrokes, the taches of colour (as described by critics) was a notational shorthand for the sensation of seeing things outdoors. While Camille’s face is carefully painted in Springtime, the foreground of the painting is brought to life through abstracted fragments of colour.
In Gladioli, painted five years later, Monet’s stylistic developments are taken further. Once again Camille posed for the figure in the garden, but her face is now indistinctly painted without identifying features.
John House provides an in-depth analysis of “Monet’s Gladioli” (Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 77, no.1/2 (2003): 8-17):
Here are some excerpts:
Throughout Gladioli, the brushwork dematerializes the forms depicted. Small areas of the light beige primed canvas are visible in many parts of the painting; these heighten the luminosity of the lighter areas of the picture, especially the flowerbed. They also remind us that the forms are not modeled in a conventional sense to suggest solidity and three-dimensionality, but are merely evoked by the network of separate colored touches that animates the entire picture surface.
By the mid-70s, there is increased fragmentation, and incongruity vis a vis the object seen and the marks used to describe it. As House describes,
The painter’s vision, as presented to us by the painted marks, is now so subtle, so sensitive, that it can take objects apart and recreate them in colored touches. We are invited to reconstitute the natural subject by taking these touches together and viewing the picture as a whole.
… viewed from up close, the brushmarks are never descriptive; only the bold verticals of the stems of gladioli stand out clearly from the complex and constantly varied textures all around them, and even the path is treated with a gently variegated touch. Likewise, the trellis and the fence do not create a rigid, linear backdrop for the scene in front of them; rather, they are integrated into the overall play of colored touches that animates the whole canvas.
The effect of the brushwork on the surface of the picture is heightened by the flotilla of white butterflies that flutter across the scene. At times they are virtually indistinguishable from the touches that convey the flowers and foliage—are there nineteen or twenty of them? We cannot be sure. Their flight and weightlessness act as a metaphor for the disembodiment of Monet’s brushstroke, for its liberation from the task of defining forms and volumes and suggesting weight and gravity.
In this context, the painting demands to be viewed in relation to contemporary paintings of related subjects—of women in gardens. Yet it cannot readily be interpreted in terms of the stock conventions of such scenes. Rather, Monet was taking a subject that carried a range of familiar associations and treating it in a way that refused to be categorized in these terms, emphasizing instead his own creative powers, both as maker of the garden and, centrally, as creator of the extraordinary painted surface that conveyed his experience of this garden.
During his years in Argenteuil, Monet evolved his methods and style of landscape painting. According to Paul Hayes Tucker, author of Impressionists at Argenteuil (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2000), Monet completed about 180 canvases during his stay “for an average of 30 pictures a year, or one every 12 days.” In 1872 alone, he created 60 paintings.
Monet began using a floating studio boat to paint on the Seine at Argenteuil. As seen in The Studio Boat, he would anchor his craft to work, completing his paintings later in his studio. The drifting movement of the boat on the river inspired momentary images that eloquently capture the flow and atmosphere of the watery scenes.
During the later 1870s, Monet sought out historically significant sites in the Capital to construct his vision of a re-born Paris. He painted the Parc Monceau six times between 1876 and 1878. Seven years earlier, during the Bloody Week of the Paris Commune, Monceau Park had been the site of brutal executions of Communards captured by troops of Versailles. Juxtaposed against this reality, Monet’s series speaks to reclamation and continuity.
Monet’s compositions pointedly leave the site’s tainted past unstated. The Parc Monceau of 1876 depicts a space that is idyllic and verdant. The trees are in full bloom, and the scene is serene, reminiscent of a sheltered private garden at a secluded moment in time.
Monet’s concern with capturing the immediacy of the transient here and now relies on the play of ephemeral light. The strips of grass and flowering trees and the delicacy of the leaves are arranged and rearranged by the dynamics of light and shadows, their infinite variations at once fleeting and anchored to a single point in time. Monet’s use of dappled light, broad outlines and strong contrasts suggest that he had already begun to experiment with the boldly two-dimensional motifs that would characterize his work of the 1880s and 1890s.
Notably, Monet’s painterly images of public life are anonymous and indeterminate, without allusions to historical narrative.
6.5
| Impressionism: A Critical Concept
During this period, Monet cultivated his impressionistic canvases, focusing on presenting visual sensations with an immediacy of execution that produced near-abstract compositions. Impression, Sunrise was painted rapidly from a hotel window at Le Havre, in thin washes, without details, underscoring Monet’s primary aim, which was to capture the fleeting pictorial elements of the given moment before him.
Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was first exhibited in a show later called the “Exhibition of the Impressionists” in Paris in April 1874. Marnin Young, in the chapter “Impressionism and Criticism” (in A Companion to Impressionism, André Dombrowski, and Dana Arnold, eds., Wiley Blackwell, 2021, 11-26) discusses the contribution of art critics to defining Impressionism, and the consistent misinterpretation and limited reading of the review by Leroy which defined the reception of Impressionism. She describes the complex intertwining of the histories of Impressionist painting and art criticism and how the historical priority given to the critical coining of “Impressionism” was refracted through the lens of the twentieth-century avant-garde citing, as John House has pointed out, that in the 1860s a “quick notation of an atmospheric effect” was already widely described as an impression.
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Landscape with Ruins, ca. 1782-1785. Oil on canvas. 33 cm x cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Here are some excerpts from the chapter:
The evidence that Leroy was the source of the words “Impressionism” (or Impressionnisme in French) and “Impressionist” rests entirely on precedence – he was certainly the first to use the words in print – but there is very little contemporary evidence that the words entered into common usage because of Leroy’s article. How critics invented Impressionism becomes, therefore, a rather different story. That story hinges on the wider transition from ‘impression’ to ‘Impressionism.’
The critical attitude of Leroy’s text is nonetheless not quite as clear as later historians have claimed. First published in Le Charivari 10 days after the exhibition of 1874 had opened, “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes” offers a fictional dialogue between a narrator (is it Leroy?) and an academic landscapist named Joseph Vincent. As the two move through the exhibition in Nadar’s studio on the boulevard des Capucines, M. Vincent becomes more and more apoplectic in front of each new painting. The narrator, by contrast, calmly attempts to explain and defend the works on display, although M. Vincent presumes he is ‘being ironic.’ Such irony forms the backbone of what Jean Renoir once called the article’s ‘Boulevard wit,’ and it is hard to determine, at least at first read, if the narrator actually shares his friend’s hostility. Indeed, the humor of the text more obviously mocks the stick-in-the-mud mentality of the academic painter. For his part, however, Vincent is clearly appalled by the ‘smears’ and ‘splashes’ of paint.
The facture in Camille Pissarro’s Hoarfrost consists of “palette scrapings spread uniformly across a dirty canvas.”
The pedestrians in the lower part of Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines are just so many “black dashes” (lichettes noires). The narrator defensively insists that, “the impression is there,” despite the lack of finish.
But in response to the impasto in Paul Cézanne’s Maison du pendu, Vincent goes off the deep end, taking the “point of view of the Impressionists” and satirically assaulting anything he finds “too finished.”
He ironically defends the ‘Impressionism’ of Berthe Morisot, because she is “not interested in reproducing a mass of pointless details.”
The narrator in turn positively suggests that “there is nothing superfluous” in the painting of Auguste Renoir.
When they eventually come across Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, an implicit definition of Impressionism has already been laid out, and the picture functions more as a confirmation of a logic than as a source for the terminology. (If anything, Cézanne and Morisot prompted the coining of the words ‘Impressionist’ and ‘Impressionism.’) The logic of Monet’s painting held, as Duret later wrote, that the ‘title was in keeping with the light rapid touch and the general indefiniteness of the outlines. Such a work adequately expressed the formula of the new painting.’ But the presumption that Monet’s title stood as the source of Leroy’s neologisms is borne out neither by the text itself, which uses both these terms before introducing Impression, Sunrise, nor by the history of the artistic usage of the word impression. Even as he definitively assigned credit to Leroy for the origin of the word ‘Impressionist,’ Duret also asserted that the term was in use even before the critic picked it up. He claimed, in fact, that the public had begun using the term and critics like Leroy, or more precisely his editor, simply borrowed it. Duret corresponded extensively with Pissarro at the time, so this assertion may be based on close testimony.
…
In the years that followed what we now call the first exhibition of the Impressionists, critics continued to cycle around the ambiguity of the term. Although alternate names for the group – “intransigeants,” “intentionists,” and “impressionalists” – still floated in the air, the question ‘what is an impressionist?’ framed the reception of the second exhibition in 1876.
…
At their third exhibit, Monet, Pissarro, and company finally embraced the name ‘Impressionists.’ Although a quasi-official journal appeared with the title L’Impressionnisme, it explicitly declined to offer any definition of the term. Critics, however, continued to puzzle it out…. Only Paul Mantz seemed to have worked out the full logic of Impressionism. He provided a sharp and sympathetic description of an Impressionist as a ‘sincere and free’ artist, who ‘translates, simply and with as much frankness as possible, the intensity of the experienced impression.’ In other words, an impression of the world enters the physiological and mental makeup of an artist, who mobilizes colored pigment as directly as possible to convey that same impression to a spectator. For both artistic practice and theory questions only proliferate here, but for a general public such an explanation seemed to resolve hereafter the problem of defining Impressionism.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the art critic and artist Wynford Dewhurst sought to convince his readership that Monet’s Impression Sunrise (and the origins of French Impressionism) were inspired by J.MW. Turner. Dewhurst had studied in Paris and was a devotee of Monet’s art. While the French were skeptical about Dewhurst’s opinion, they reluctantly accepted that Turner had anticipated some Impressionist effects.
In “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development ” (Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 56, no. 2887 (1908): 475–89), Dewhurst wrote:
From 1773, then, being the natal year of that colossus amongst artists, dates all that is worthy of emulation in landscape painting. Now, since the greatest triumphs of Impressionism have been won on the field of landscape, it naturally follows that Turner and in less degree his friend, John Constable, are the true inspirators of the school. It derives from them as naturally and as easily as does the river from its mountain source, or the flowers of the field from the sunlit sky.
We shall presently see how France, through Turner’s eyes, did awake to the beauties revealed by this same light of Nature, and how, through France, the world at large has been enlightened. Whilst, in England Turner and Constable were striving after light, and more light, ambitious to imprison the sun’s very rays upon their canvas, their cross-channel neighbours were just as ardently engaged upon a system of painting of their own invention, and far removed in objective from that of the Englishmen. They resigned themselves to the impossibility of sunlight and atmospheric painting, and took refuge in obscurity.
The sight, however, of Turner’s and Constable’s pictures, frequently exhibited at the Paris Salon and in London, coupled in all likelihood with the study of Ruskin’s clear exposition of their underlying principle, was undoubtedly the foundation and starting point of the brilliantly successful phase of art now known to the world as Impressionism.
Certainly, Monet’s Impression, Sunrise echoes Turner’s penchant for thinly painted surfaces, a restricted colour palette, and a summary rendition of form, all in the service of compelling visual effects. There is a sense of the ephemeral, the light absorbing and dematerializing mass and structure. Turner, coined the ‘painter of light’ because the brilliant intensity of his light sources often conveyed the presence of the supernatural, was the first to turn away from brown or buff priming of his canvas, preferring to lay down a brilliant white undercoat to enhance the brilliance of the final work.
Seventy years after Dewhurst’s pronouncement, John House called into question Turner’s influence in “New Material on Monet and Pissarro in London in 1870-71” (Burlington Magazine 120, no. 907 (1978): 636–42.)
Pissarro and Monet had visited several museums and galleries in London while staying with their families during the Franco-Prussian War. As House describes, Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien shortly before his death in 1903, expressing his concern about Dewhurst’s statements. His ideas about the origins of Impressionism were published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts as follows:
He says that before going to London [in 1870] we [Monet and Pissarro] had no conception of light. The fact is that we have studies which prove the contrary. He omits the influence of Claude [Lorrain], Corot, etc. But what he has no suspicion of, is that Turner and Constable, while they taught us something, showed us in their works that they had no understanding of the analysis of shadow, which in Turner’s painting is simply used as an effect, a mere absence of light. As far as true division is concerned, Turner proved the value of this as a method, although he did not apply it correctly and naturally. . .
It seems to me that Turner, too, looked at the works of Claude Lorrain… Mr. Dewhurst has his nerve.
6.6
| Landscape and the Legacy of Romanticism
Throughout the late 19th century, Monet’s paintings were regarded as odes to “optical realism,” devoid of subjectivity and sentiment. Critics disparagingly described his impressionism as an art of scientific objectivity, opposed in spirit and intention to the tenets of Romanticism. However, Monet’s immersion in perceptual reality has many affinities with the landscape legacy of Romanticism.
Monet and the Impressionists were assumed to have painted exclusively out of doors, working spontaneously, and impassively. In large part, that was an accurate assumption. Monet’s purpose was to create finished pictures in which the most valued qualities of the sketch, its freshness of execution and truth to the moment, were preserved. This characteristic was also an essential feature of Romantic painting, where the evoked sense of a rapidly executed sketch paralleled the artist’s emotionally honest portrayal of a subject exactly as it appeared at a particular moment.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the French Romantic landscape painter par excellence, was an influential precursor of Claude Monet. Corot taught Eugène Boudin and was an informal teacher of Pissarro and others, his legacy of painting directly from nature shaping the approach of a generation of artists.
Corot emphasized the Romanticist values of sincerity and individuality to the younger artists who admired and worked with him. He stressed the value of seeing and responding to natural light effects to convey the “sincerity of emotion” of one’s first, true impression and, as he articulated, “to choose only subjects that harmonize(d) with one’s particular impressions considering that each person’s soul is a mirror in which nature is reflected.”
Romantic artists of the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century embraced the sensory, exalted the sublime and encouraged a sympathetic engagement with the natural world. Like era writers, they focused on subjective feeling and intuition over rational objectivity. The German novelist and poet Goethe’s credo that “Feeling is all!” sums up the raison d’être of Romantic art. Historians have argued, and affirmed, the continuity between Romanticism and the avant-garde.
The poet Arthur Rimbaud regarded Romanticism as the predecessor of new artistic and poetic ideals. In his Lettre du voyant, he wrote to Paul Demeny Charleville ( May 15, 1871) , “Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics? The Romantics? They prove so clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is, the idea sung and understood by the singer.” However, his acknowledgement of the heritage of Romanticism was accompanied by his recognition of the right to deny it … Besides, newcomers have a right to condemn their ancestors: on est chez soi et on a le temps.”
Monet’s legacy as a plein air painter of light, and his ties to the artists of the Forest of Fontainebleau and Boudin, have tended to obscure his romanticist roots. But it is a relationship that has been recently addressed in varied interpretations of the evolution of Monet’s oeuvre.
The following excerpts from the Companion to Impressionism give credence to this interpretative approach.
Mary-Dailey Marais:
Despite the fact that Monet’s approach to painting has often been portrayed as merely an optical exercise (we need only think of Cézanne’s oft-cited remark, “Monet was only an eye, but my god what an eye!”), Monet’s most sensitive critics, both in the nineteenth century and the present day, turned attention to the subjective aspects of his “impressions.” Indeed the word itself implies a degree of subjectivity. Consider the reflections of the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary upon seeing the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874: “They are Impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.” In the same review, Castagnary added that, if taken to the extreme, the Impressionists “will arrive at that degree of Romanticism without bounds, where nature is no more than a pretext for dreams, and that the imagination becomes incapable of formulating anything other than personal subjective fantasies, without any echo in general knowledge, because they are without regulation and without any possible verification in reality.”
Marc Gotlieb:
Pissarro made two complaints – at first sight distinct, but the one following from the other: Monet’s new paintings were ‘romantic,’ that is to say keyed in some manner to the drama of the self. But they were also a ‘salesman’s game,’ made to sell. Perhaps what the anarchist Pissarro meant was that Monet’s new Romanticism flattered bourgeois fantasies of interiority, and in this respect was a marketplace move most of all. Modern scholars, for their part, have been generally sympathetic to such an understanding, and no wonder. Beyond growing success, expressed for example in Monet’s first retrospective at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in 1882, the 1880s were enormously productive, the artist completing nearly 500 paintings in the first half of the decade alone. The garish colors, dramatic vistas, melodramatic moods – the ‘extremes’ of the 1880s, as they have been termed, have come to seem like an effort on Monet’s part to “extend his range,” to avoid being “typecast” – a savvy career strategy in the wake of rising prices and growing demand.
Monet’s emphasis on the colouristic and tonal effects of atmosphere and his landscapes’ ethereal and evanescent nature, not to mention their sensory dimension, echo elements of the Romantic landscape tradition. His works may also be read as Romantic in their visual articulation of an ideal France.
English Romantic artists such as Constable and Turner had invested the natural landscape with epic overtones. Constable cast the rural landscape as a lost Eden, where pristine air, water and space were a metaphor for moral goodness in the face of the evils of industrial modernism. His enormous, poetic scenes of canals, fields, mills, and cottages surrounding and including his father’s property in East Anglia employed the effects of light and shadow, the textures of earth and plant life, as sensory expressions of a union with nature, declaring in 1821 that “painting is but another word for feeling.”
Turner, by contrast, painted nature’s vital spirit and took his technical prowess to expressive extremes. He aimed to inspire reverence and trepidation through dramatic distillations of natural events. His atmospheric, near-abstract paintings compelled Constable to remark (somewhat disparagingly) that Turner “seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and airy.”
In Germany, the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich urged artists to “study nature after nature and not after paintings.” He invested his landscapes with symbolism and intimations of the sublime.
Friedrich’s works also contained political implications. Two Men Contemplating the Moon signals the aftermath of Germany’s liberation from Napoleon’s yoke. Friedrich articulated patriotic fervour in this painting by presenting his two figures in traditional German costumes that new authorities had outlawed. Such political statements were widespread among artists and writers who were consequently prosecuted as “demagogues.” The fact that the banned outfits were recurring motifs in Friedrich’s works indicates his abiding political views.
In France, Romantic landscapes were best represented by Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet.
Their works contrasted the passion-filled, exotic Romanticism of Gericault or Delacroix.
Returning to Monet’s A Corner of the Studio, discussed in the opening passages of this chapter, it is notable that the artist was compelled to insert a landscape by Charles-François Daubigny in his own picture, tellingly replacing a religious icon. Its inclusion in the composition may be read as an indicator of the patriotism to come and an homage to his homeland.
Indeed, Monet’s landscapes have been interpreted as soulful representations of ‘La France’ and the artist came to be regarded as a national painter.
In 1899, Durand-Ruel wrote: “Monet’s work above all expresses France, at once subtle and ungainly, refined and rough, nuanced and flashy….Monet is one of greatest national painters; he knows the beautiful elements of countryside whether harmonious or contradictory…he has expressed everything that forms the soul of our race.”
Monet, however, insisted that the significance of landscape as a motif lay in its transient, unbound nature, stating in 1891, “For me a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment…For me it is only the surrounding atmosphere that gives subjects their true value.”
This and related statements have led to a general consideration of Monet’s choice of subject matter and its socio-historical attribution as unimportant. The reality is that in Monet’s later paintings, as will be seen, his subject choices were not random but tinged with historical, national, or religious associations.
6.7
| Monet’s Serial Subjects
In the 1880s, Monet began exploring a new direction in his painting process, the spontaneity of completing his works en plein air giving way to a more systematic approach to Impressionism. With his later multi-canvas series, Haystacks (1890-1891), Poplars (1891), Rouen Cathedral (ca.1892-1894), and Water Lilies (1914-1926) his subjects were carefully studied, started in situ, then reworked in his studio to achieve the sense of instantaneity he sought.
In 1891 Monet concentrated on his poplar paintings. This series of twenty-four paintings captured the form and colour of the poplars in changing light conditions, over a period of several months, from early spring into the fall.
A recurring feature in the French countryside during the nineteenth century, the poplar after the French Revolution become symbolic of liberty, largely due to its name peupliers which derives from ‘le people,’ meaning ‘the people.’ Within the popular imagination, the poplars came to symbolize the stability of the French nation and the fertility and beauty of rural France.
Monet painted over twenty works that portray the same subject in the Haystacks series. Still, they are distinctive in every other respect, altered in appearance and ambiance by the effects of transient light, changing seasons and atmospheric conditions.
Monet wanted viewers to recreate the optical experience of the painting process. The bulk of haystacks, painted in flattened patches and tonal contrasts suspended within an atmospheric haze, are visualized in our sensory comprehension of their shifting, shimmering contours and colours. He aimed to elicit felt experience and to do so without the need for spectacular scenery. The un-picturesque and conventional haystacks are transformed and transformational, conveying temporal sensations while evoking a sense of ethereal nature.
In October 1890, Monet expressed the challenges he faced painting the haystacks to the art critic Gustave Geffroy writing: “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…”
The artist’s successful struggle against the fugitive forces of nature was a notion that Monet himself partly perpetuated:
When I began I was like the others; I believed that two canvases would suffice, one for grey weather and one for sun. At that time I was painting some haystacks that had excited me and that made a magnificent group, just two steps from here. One day, I saw that my lighting had changed. I said to my stepdaughter: “Go to the house, if you don’t mind, and bring me another canvas!” She brought it to me, but a short time afterward it was again different: “Another! Still another!” And I worked on each one only when I had my effect, that’s all. It’s not very difficult to understand.” (Claude Monet, 1920; see William C. Seitz, Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments, MoMA, 1960, 22)
As a subject, Rouen Cathedral contrasts with the impermanent and mundane motif of the Haystacks. Laden with history, the Cathedral paintings are architecturally iconic and monumental—signifiers of permanence. That they are imbued with an evanescence born of Monet’s focus on light’s altering, deconstructive potential renders them even more powerful.
6.8
| Paint Tubes and Portable Easels:
Monet’s Modern Palette
Monet’s quest to capture the intricacies of light may have related to an understanding of its significance beyond aesthetics. The German Romantic philosopher F.W.J. Schelling had stressed the symbolic importance of light in rendering nature’s invisible soul, a notion that contrasted with Enlightenment thought, which emphasized matter and motion.
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was popularized in France, England, and the United States through the writings of Mme de Stael, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, influencing the work of Romantic landscape artists.
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From a scientific standpoint, Monet’s approach to the substance and effects of light may be linked to studies of the atom and molecular theory and their relationship to light. Charles Gerhardt and Auguste Laurent, originators of atomic theory, believed that those atoms and molecules were not mental abstractions but material objects constituting veritable blueprints for nature.
In Hermann von Helmholtz’s famous essay on the relation of optics to painting, reprinted in Ernst Wilhelm Brucke’s Principes scientifiques des Beaux-Arts, 1878, atmospheric perspective and the effect of air on light are described by the translator as “molecules de l’air” and “molecules flottantes.”
This concept of the molecular composition of the atmosphere is evident in Monet’s paintings, where the painting of substantial form is presented as amorphous fields comprised of molecular particles of light.
Goethe, often considered Helmholtz’s predecessor, was less scientific. His theories about colour and its relational aspects emphasized passionate feeling, and his treatise acknowledged the significance of colour as an essential part of human experience. He explored the psychological impact of different colours on mood and emotion—the sensory dimension of colour and its effect on the perceptual process. He asserted that the sensations of colour were determined by our perception, the mechanics of human vision, and how brains process information. Ultimately, what we see of an object depends upon the thing, the lighting, and our perception.
Much has been written about the possible influence of Goethe on Monet. In « La non-réception française de la Théorie des couleurs » de Goethe, Revue germanique internationale 13 (2000) : 169-186) Jacques Le Rider writes that there is little evidence of Goethe’s influence of light and colour on French painting. Rather it was Goethe’s concept of Romantic feeling which merged into the French tenets of Romanticism.
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The 1839 publication of French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés (…) (The Laws of Contrast of Colors) was essential to the Impressionistic movement. Chevreul advanced that when two neighbouring colours are seen simultaneously, they appear different because one will cast a complementary hue on the other adjacent to it. As such, adjacent, non-complementary colours appear impure, while complementary colours appear bright, vibrant and intense.
Georges Roque writes in “Chevreul and Impressionism: A Reappraisal” (Art Bulletin, 78 no. 1 (March 1996): 26-39):
In the first section of his chapter devoted to the “utility of the law of simultaneous contrast of color in the science of coloring,” Chevreul explained that: “The painter must know, and especially see, the modifications of white light, shade and colors which the model presents to him in the circumstances under which he would reproduce In other words, the painter must know how to see, know before seeing, know how to see better. And one cannot make this knowledge visible without exaggerating the effect.”
…
The Impressionists were certainly attentive to the special way of seeing recommended by Chevreul. But while the chemist thought it necessary to be aware of these modifications in order more effectively to eliminate them (as Schapiro noted), the Impressionists were interested in the modifications for their own sake: they thought to represent them, insofar as they considered the “optical sensations” given by the perception of an object more important than the “faithful” representation of its conventional appearance.
In an oft-quoted remark, characteristic of his position toward the visible, Monet said: “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.” According to this statement, Monet was looking at the organization of color spots per se, rather than at the objects. This presents an opportunity to address the myth that the Impressionist painters did not need any “theory,” since they trusted their eyes exclusively. Whether the phenomenologists agree or not, there is no such thing as a “wild eye.” And the Impressionists no more and no less than any others could simply copy what their eyes “saw.” The cognitive sciences have proved that there is no purely visual perception, for perception is already a cognitive phenomenon. At a more general level, there is no perception without implicit or explicit knowledge about what there is to see, knowledge that is dependent on cultural background; and that background, scientific as well as artistic, gave more importance in the 1860s to the “accidents” of light than to color constancy. It is therefore vain to wonder whether the Impressionists did or did not formulate explicit “theories”: it is enough to say that the scientific knowledge that was part of the artists’ background-since the time of the Barbizon School-gave form to their perception, and thus to their way of painting. It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the importance of cultural factors on color perception, since many studies have been devoted to this topic.
In Monet’s Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, objects and forms appear to dissolve beneath the sun overhead. Here, the house is painted with light falling directly onto the left side of its roof, rendering it almost indistinguishable in value from the sky above, the intensity of light replacing what would be the familiar isolating aspects of colour and its mutations. This is particularly noticeable compared to the right side of the roof, which is not sunlit and abuts the sky as a grey horizontal rectangle beside another that is bright blue.
Monet often illuminated his forms from behind to be perceived as flat silhouetted surfaces. Objects appear to merge, light and colour fusing the individual elements. Through such strategies, Monet convincingly conveyed the qualities he sought for each image.
Monet’s general practice demonstrates how, beyond aesthetic advances, scientific inventions contributed to new techniques that facilitated Impressionism’s interest in exploring the immediacy of light effects. One significant innovation in art supplies was the so-called French easel, a handy box that unfolded into a stand and included a palette and holder. Portable and efficient, the easel facilitated the transportation of artists’ materials.
In 1841, the American artist John Rend invented the tin tube to store paint pigment. The tube could be compressed to dispense the necessary amount of colour onto a palette, and a lid ensured that the remaining paint would not dry out. Such mundane improvements, the painter’s box easel and the paint tubes, allowed artists to venture outside their studios and into the open air to paint. Furthermore, new, blunt-edged brushes altered application techniques, allowing for looser brushwork and the easy use of heavy impasto.
Improved knowledge of inorganic chemistry (metals and their compounds) led to the creation of materials that permitted artists to experiment with a broader range of intense and stable colours, using chromium, cadmium, cobalt, zinc, copper, and arsenic. Monet’s typical palette, for instance, comprised lead white, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, French ultramarine, cerulean blue, emerald green, viridian, chrome green (a combination of chrome yellow and Prussian blue sold premixed), cadmium yellow, chrome yellow, lemon yellow, yellow ochre, vermilion, red ochre, red lake, cobalt violet and ivory black.
Monet exploited colours fully while employing a limited palette. Close-up, one discerns that his colours were often used straight from the tube or mixed on the canvas to enable the creation of myriad subtle and unique tones. Earth pigments, browns and blacks, were banished from his palette. When asked in 1905 what colours he used, Monet replied: “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.”
This limited palette was employed by many painters, providing warm and cool tones of each primary colour, along with white. Some painters, like Monet, often added green to facilitate mixing chroma for landscape painting and to combine with alizarin crimson to produce a chromatic black.
Monet’s raw canvases were light in colour, often white, pale gray, or very light yellow, and his pigments were opaque. He also employed the scumbling technique, using thin, broken layers of paint, which allow lower layers of colour to break through. His textures were built up in rapid brushstrokes, varying from thick to thin, with tiny dabs of light, adding contours for definition and colour harmonies, working from dark to light.
It is important to note that Monet’s were not merely experiments in colour and light. His paintings were observations of transient life events and expressions of felt experience.
There is perhaps no better example of how light and colour act as carriers of intense, subjective feeling than in Monet’s portrait of his dead wife Camille, painted as the first rays of daylight floated into the room.
Camille Doncieux died of pelvic cancer on September 5, 1879 (although some sources mention tuberculosis or a botched abortion may have been the cause of her death).
Monet confided to Clemenceau:
I found myself at daybreak at the bedside of a dead woman who had been and always will be dear to me. My gaze was fixed on her tragic temples, and I caught myself observing the shades and nuances of colour Death brought to her countenance. Blues, yellows, grey I don’t know what. That is the state I was in. The wish came upon me, quite naturally to record the image of her departing from us forever. But before it occurred to me to draw those features I knew and loved so well, I was first and foremost devastated, organically, automatically, by the colours.
In this intensely personal painting of profound loss, the still chill of death is contrasted by the dawning sunlight that has entered the space, creating a clash that renders the image more poignant. The only interior glow emits from a handful of blossoms at Camille’s breast. The immediacy of Monet’s brushwork is agitated, unrestrained, and at times applied with a movingly tender delicacy. The dead woman’s face is abstracted, unfinished, seeming to sink into the depths of the canvas.
In “Camille Monet on Her Deathbed (1879): A Radical Veillée Mortuaire,” Adrian Lewis connects the painting to Monet’s dismissal of Catholic beliefs.
(https://www.academia.edu/10929904/Camille_Monet_on_Her_Deathbed_1879_A_Radical_Veill%C3%A9e_Mortuaire_Adrian_Lewis)
The painting is not a contemplative image of a woman in eternal repose, beautiful in death. Camille’s dying involved agonising pain, and Monet’s painting shows it. The dead face is thin and wasted, the jaw strapped in place but the lips parted, making the contrast between the tight shut eyes and frozen but open mouth all the more tragic. Light strokes cross the face, veiling her left eyelid and defining her nose simply with a patch of lower shadow, so that all the emphasis of the face falls on that mouth which will never speak again to the artist but which he almost wills to speak, given the unusually parted lips. The swift instantaneity of perception and execution militates against the function of portraiture as commemoration.
Mid-nineteenth century representations of deathbed scenes sought to present death as serene and beautiful, the good death of a Christian with nothing to fear and everything to hope for in the afterlife. In the words of Chateaubriand, such images invite us to “come and see the most beautiful spectacle that the earth can present: come and see the death of the believer” (Emmanuelle Héran, Le dernier portrait (Paris: Musée d’ Orsay 2002, 47). A good death involved knowledge that death is coming and spiritual preparation for it, unlike the assumption for many within our present-day culture that a swift and unexpected death is best.
Monet did not make an open declaration of his Radical atheism in any will, though he does seem to have left instructions that even flowers from his garden should not be wasted on his funeral. However, his painterly dissection of the look of his dead wife is driven by a similar outlook. To present a real corpse with whom one feels less of a connection than with the person when alive is to resist the power of religion to invest meaning in such a death. The more deflationary the artist’s gaze, suggesting that the body had lost the ability to feel and to think, and that the human spirit had simply gone, the more radically resistant Monet would be to the context in which he found himself, where his closest friends were investing her death with spiritual meaning. Monet might even have felt that he had gone far enough in accommodating his wife and friend Alice’s desire for a Catholic departure. Time now to pin his colours to the mast, as it were, to leave his own testament about the nature of her dying, to make his contribution to the cause of truthfulness. Monet would have his own secularized and radical version of the veillée mortuaire, in which he would work through his own grieving process while at the same time registering exactly what this death of his beloved was really like.
6.9
| Impressionism and Music
During the early 19th century, Romantic aesthetic theory favoured a musical rather than a literal paradigm for painting. Music, the German Romantic philosopher Schopenhauer said, had a vested power to make “every picture, indeed every scene from real life and the world, appear enhanced in significance.” Music’s ability to evoke emotions at a complete remove from reality with “inexpressible depth” could make visible that which lay beyond regular sight.
The concept of creating sensory effects in landscapes had been encouraged by Corot and was related to his practice and pleasure of listening to music. As such, it attached to notions of symbiosis between pictorial art and music as theorized by Romanticists.
By the mid-nineteenth century in France, as in Germany, affiliations between music and landscape painting were recognized by Romantic composers from Beethoven and Wagner to Chopin, Schubert, and Debussy. The resonance of sound and harmony in piano was understood as analogous to the evocative effects of colour and light; music and art thus accorded the intent of conveying feelings.
Similarly, colour for Monet was more complex than selecting and applying appropriate hues to an isolated element in an image. Instead, it was a complex harmonization of tones and textures intended to reverberate throughout the work. With the full development of symphonic orchestration, musical terms such as lyrical and sonorous began to be applied to landscape imagery as a reference to its rhythms and painterly tempo.
Roger Marx grasped echoes of the French Romantic composer Debussy in Monet’s later works, remarking that Monet’s landscape “succeeds in touching us, as a musical phrase or chord touches us, in the depths of our being, without the aid of a more precise or clearly enunciated idea.”
That which was incomplete in a landscape, or visible only at the peripheries of an image, or a pause in a melody, came to encapsulate the enigmatic, the unknown.
The French composer Berlioz created analogies between landscape elements and musical intonation, and Beethoven’s Symphony Number 6 (The Pastoral) increasingly served as the prime example of this meta world, an alternative nature, capable of communicating where sense-translating words failed, to unveil “infinity” and the “cosmos.”
Berlioz described The Pastoral as both a poem and a visual landscape (ca. 1830) “…this poem of Beethoven, these long phrases so richly coloured, these living pictures, these perfumes, that light, that eloquent silence, those vast horizons, these enchanted nooks secreted in the woods, those golden harvests, those rose-coloured clouds like wandering flocks on the surface of the sky, that immense plain seeming to slumber under the rays of the midday sun.”
Berlioz spoke of its effect as an evocation of the sensation of landscape in the listener, an affirmation of musical speech exposing heretofore as an indescribable and even unimaginable world.
The Romantic concepts of masculine and feminine in music were equally applied to the characterization of elements of Romantic art. The so-called masculine music (of Wagner, for example) was characterized by a dramatic quality which included major intervals, robust sound, loud volume, full orchestral scorings and a predominance of wind and brass instruments.
These elements can be similarly applied to some of Monet’s works, incarnating in vigorous brushstrokes that create robust formal arrangements to portray jagged rocks, for example, or daring juxtapositions of elemental forms as forces of energy.
In his weeping willow paintings, Monet employs a dynamic stylistic technique and vibrant colours that divert from the lyricism of much of his work. The artist’s pictorial language had radically altered at the beginning of the 20th century, with harmonious colour schemes and compositions making way for loud, bold effects and fragmented compositions creating undefined, abstracted images. The anthropomorphized willow presents as frenetic energy; it is a deconstructed image, a metaphor perhaps for the destruction brought about by the First World War or the sorrowful apprehension of waning strength in old age.
Did Monet paint this series of Weeping Willows to express the grief of France for her lost sons? Weeping willows, a symbol of mourning, are often found in French cemeteries. In J.J. Grandville’s poem Les fleurs animées, grief is symbolized by the weeping willow:
Les fleurs animées (Flowers Personified):
Come into my shade all you who suffer, for I am the Weeping Willow.
I conceal in my foliage a woman with a gentle face.
Her blonde hair hangs over her brow and veils her tearful eye.
She is the muse of all those who have loved…
She comforts those touched by death.
6.10
| Landscape and the Female Form
It is the feminine principle, however, that is often the wellspring of Monet’s poetic expression, a visual analogue to the harmonic subtleties of Debussy’s revolutionary music, aspects of which are present, for instance, in Monet’s Poppy Field in Argenteuil, a legato with delicate instrumentation, small intervals and regular rhythms.
Monet’s female figures are often painted in harmonious accord with nature, their silhouettes integrated into the pictorial composition as aspects of a fertile world, immersed into the verdant fields and light of the sky or depicted as at one with nature through a fluent merging of colour, light, and form.
In Monet’s two open-air studies, Suzanne, the daughter of Alice Hoschedé, Monet’s second wife, is differentiated mainly by a flipped pose; in one she faces left, and in the other, she looks to the right. Her face is abstracted as she stands holding a parasol in the middle of a blazing field. The works represent Monet’s attempts at reconciling his interest in figuration with his love of landscape painting. In a letter to Théodore Duret, Monet explained his challenge: “I am entangled in some large canvases that I have been working on for months and from which I cannot extricate myself…I am at work as ever on new initiatives, open-air figures as I understand them, done like landscapes. It is an old dream that still plagues me and that I would one day wish to achieve; but it is so difficult.” (August 13, 1887)
The relationship between the female figure and the natural world can be further seen in works such as Boating on the River Epte, where the women are depicted floating in a canoe on the water,
or gazing into its dark depths, suggesting an elemental synergy between the feminine and water.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Corot had created idyllic scenes that incorporated female figures by streams and ponds, echoing the ancient belief that water was a transitional element, female in nature, linking earth and the immaterial, and a symbol of birth and fertility.
Preceding generations of artists had explored this principle. During the early Renaissance, Sandra Botticelli’s Birth of Venus represented the goddess Venus emerging from the sea as a fully-grown young woman.
The concept of nature as a body, specifically nature as a gendered body, was a strand of pre-modern conceptions of nature in the West; nature as a kind of living womb, a female body, a powerful procreative and regenerative form, and a dynamic embodiment of cosmic creation.
The Renaissance introduced images of nature that influenced later artists considerably.
In the paintings of Botticelli and others, nature is often tame, a peaceful garden. Such pastoral imagery equates nature and the female with passivity and without passion.
In 1802 the German Romantic artist Phillipp Otto Runge proclaimed landscape to be the art of the future, an embodiment of divine mysteries that could enrapture and transport the viewer to a higher spiritual awareness. He believed religious art would take on new forms as spiritualized landscapes that transcended descriptions of the natural world to express occult forces.
Runge believed that every flower and tree contained human spirit or sensibility, and as such that nature was reminiscent of Paradise, reflecting the German philosopher Schelling’s claim that “the living spirit in every flower is put there by man; it is from this that the landscape arises; all the animals and flowers only half exist when mankind does not do his best.”
In Runge’s allegorical Morning, the cosmic nature of the event is expressed in an ethereal spatial arrangement. The central female that Runge refers to as Aurora and Venus is depicted as bringing forth a new day and era of love. She may also be interpreted as a spirit manifestation or motherhood itself. The work is perfectly symmetrical; the earth is a horizontal, harmonious landscape above which genii float gently. Brilliant colour animates the scene, further expressing the Divine in nature.
Monet’s Water Lilies are similarly evocative of a feminine oneness with nature. This idea has retained relevance and resonates in contemporary green politics and cultural theory. The so-called “Gaia hypothesis” (named after the Greek goddess of the earth) proposes that the earth can be regarded as an organism involving a network of interdependent life processes, whereby different species and cycles of the natural world interact to maintain the balance of the whole.
6.11
| Giverny and the Influence of the Orient
Monet moved to Giverny some years after the death of Camille in 1879. He was accompanied by Alice Hoschedé, his companion, and their eight children. Monet and Hoschedé married in 1892.
As he had at Argenteuil, Monet, a passionate horticulturalist, began working on his garden, applying the same principles he did to painting. He started with a flower garden and in 1893, after obtaining permits to divert water sources, he started his iconic water lily pond. Monet intended to create a garden for the pleasures of viewing and as a wellspring of painting motifs.
He started with a flower garden and in 1893, after obtaining permits to divert water sources, he started his iconic water lily pond. Monet intended to create a garden for the pleasures of viewing and as a wellspring of painting motifs.
The oriental garden exerted an influence on European culture in the 19th century. The extravagant large-scale gardens of Chinese and Japanese emperors and more minor, intimate landscapes were designed to be harmonious expressions of the bonds between nature and humanity.
Typically, the enclosed garden featured ponds, trees, flowers, rocks, bridges and small pavilions. The winding paths carry strollers through the garden to scenes meant to awe and inspire.
Varying viewpoints of the garden are afforded by bridges made of stone slabs or timber, and sometimes painted brightly, which overlook ponds usually filled with lotus flowers.
The ponds are often the central feature of the garden, designed to convey a sense of ever-changing nature, where the reflections of the sky, flowers and trees, winds, clouds, sunlight, times of day and seasons constantly transform water.
Walking and pausing through these gardens may be equated with the scroll of an Oriental landscape painting.
[NEXT TWO IMAGES ARE PAIRED SIDE BY SIDE]
The oriental garden opposed Neoclassical ideals and tastes which sought out symmetry above all, the epitome of which was attained in the gardens at Versailles, for example. Such formal gardens boasted straight lines and symmetrical vistas, a layout of geometrically aligned paths and beds whose plant life was trimmed and manicured to precision.
Against such a backdrop, the lyricism of the oriental garden appealed to Romanticists and Impressionists alike, not least for its sensory dimension and changeability.
In Man’s Responsibility for Nature (New York: Scribner, 1974), philosopher John Passmore proposed two leading traditions in modern Western thought. The first is that matter is inert and passive requiring reshaping and control, as seen at the pre-Romantic Versailles. The second (Hegelian) view proposes nature as codependent, actualized through art, science, philosophy, and technology, to become a place that accommodates humanity. In the latter, humanity completes nature, not just by living in it but by contributing to its creation, vitality, form and colour.
The entry into Europe of an influential Oriental aesthetic began soon after Japanese ports reopened to trade with the West in 1854. Oriental artifacts became widely available in France in venues such as a Far Eastern curio shop called Le Porte Chinoise, which Siegfried Bing opened near the Louvre Museum in 1862. It sold fans, kimonos, lacquered boxes, hanging scrolls, ceramics, bronze statuary, and other items, which found a ready audience in the artists who frequented the area.
In 1867, Japan held its first formal arts and crafts exhibition at the Paris Exposition Universelle, which furthered interest in Orientalist artifacts, and they rapidly became stylish.
The art dealer Bing was one of Paris’s first importers of Japanese decorative arts. He sold them in his shop and promoted them in his lavish magazine Le Japon artistique, published between 1888 to 1891.
Bing believed that nature was the Japanese artist’s “constant guide . . . his sole, revered teacher whose precepts form the ‘inexhaustible source of his inspiration’ and to whom he ‘surrenders himself with frank fervor.”
By 1876 the term Japonisme was in common usage. It was coined by the French journalist and art critic Philippe Burty in an article published in 1876 to describe the strong interest in Japanese artworks and decorative items.
Elisa Evett in “The Late Nineteenth-century European Critical Response to Japanese Art: Primitivist Leanings” (Art History 6, no. 1 (March 1983): 82-106), chronicles the key French writings about the Japanese oriental garden.
These are some excerpts:
Gustave Geffroy played on the ‘fin de siecle’ nostalgia for the Golden Age by emphasizing the changes the Western world had wrought upon its environment, eradicating all traces of a Garden of Eden. He contrasted the disagreeable environment of modern London with the idyllic, remote world of Hokusai’s Japan…. Geffroy juxtaposed the most dramatic effects and potent symbols of industrialized Europe — the hurried pace of life, the roar of the machine, and the pollution of the environment — with an image of an unspoiled Japan — a land of unadulterated natural beauty and innocent, youthfully spirited people. Although Geffroy exaggerated, he revealed one aspect of the European infatuation for Japanese art. He, like others, envisioned Japan as an Eastern Eden or Arcadia, an idyllic environment where man lived in harmony with tamed but unviolated nature; where a close communion with a beneficent universe preserved the original childlike innocence of its people.
…
John LaFarge made explicit the direct relationship between the natural beauty of the Japanese landscape and the enduring, intimate, respectful appreciation of the Japanese for it when he wrote: “The lovely scenery reminds me continually of what has been associated with it; a civilization which has been born of it, has never separated from nature, has its religion, its art, and its historic associations entangled withal natural manifestations. The great Pan might still be living here, in a state of the world which has sanctified trees and groves, and associated the spirit-world with every form of the earthly dwelling-place.”
…
Michel Revon’s description of the Japanese landscape also rings with Arcadian overtones. He attributed to it ‘un beauté tout hellenique’ and lauded the sweetness of nature’s effect on the people. As others did, he interpreted Shintoism as an expression of the seductive hold that the beauty of the natural surroundings had on the temperament of the people and on their system of explaining the world….Renan waxed poetic about the Japanese sympathetic identification with nature. He elevated the relationship to a semi-religious plane and called up a metaphor that has a metaphysical ring to it to characterize the way the Japanese resonate with nature.
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Théodore de Wyzewa was even more explicit in proclaiming that the Japanese, their childlike perceptions of the world, do not distinguish themselves from the world around them. They simply see the world as an extension of themselves; in a child’s narcissism, they love nature as a part of themselves….De Wyzewa’s final remark was a common observation about Hokusai’s animal and plant studies in the Manga and the tradition of bird and flower painting of which those studies were a part. This kind of isolation and scrutiny of individual creatures and living organisms indicated to many critics the evidence of a profound love of and identification with nature. De Wyzewa explained that the Japanese artist did not need to paint ‘after nature,’ since by virtue of his feeling for it, he was automatically imbued with an intuitive sense of form and color.
The oriental garden inspired the Romantic sensibility of seventeenth century artists like Claude Lorrain.
Several writers admired the gardens of the Far East, China and Japan, contributing to an aesthetic taste for the picturesque.
In 1685 Sir William Temple, an essayist and statesman compares Western and Eastern concepts of natural beauty in Upon the Gardens of Epicurus:
Among us [Europeans], the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities; our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact distances. The Chineses scorn this way of planting … But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem. And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best screens or purcellans, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order.
About one hundred years later in his poem Kubla Khan Samuel Taylor Coleridge evokes the peaceful qualities of the Chinese emperor’s garden in contrast to the warfare of the world.
In addition, by the late nineteenth century, public parks across Europe had introduced picturesque garden features like pagodas, pavilions, and bridges. Still, few expressed the aesthetic raison d’etre of the oriental garden. The exception was Monet, whose full embrace of the oriental garden was conceptual as well as aesthetic.
Monet’s water-lily garden exhibited many oriental features, including a natural layout and reflective waters. The water-lily garden is a Romantic and Oriental conception.
The design principles of the garden were inspired by the Japanese block prints that filled the walls of his house.
Monet used the visual elements of Hiroshige’s prints as a reference point, using irregular shapes to create rapidly changing points of interest and many visual perspectives to engage the eye. His conscientiously crafted garden provided him with aesthetic inspiration for his painterly practice.
6.12
| Monet’s Water Landscapes
Monet began painting his waterlilies between 1897 and 1900 with a series that was relatively homogenous, most of the canvases bearing this particular date having a more or less square format and representing the pond closest to the road with its footbridge and willow branches. From the start, the water pond paintings were rich in national poetic significance recalling the French philosopher Voltaire’s adage that nature was the source of all goodness and wisdom, and that each person should cultivate his own garden.
In Monet’s Water Lilies, flatness and a decentralized composition create a dreamy, unreal picture plane where the lilies, which would be floating in water in reality, appear to float in space. Monet purposefully cultivated a sense of irrational space by cropping the edges and pulling the objects to the surface plane of the work.
In 1899, Monet began a series of eighteen views of the wooden footbridge over the pond. He would finish twelve paintings of the bridge that same summer. In their atypical vertical format within the context of his overall works, the water lilies assume an expanded space in the foreground, the floating flowers and their reflections over the pond capturing our immediate attention.
In Japanese Footbridge Monet treats the wisteria and drum bridge as one, the bridge spanning the lake and overhanging trees melding into a seamless yet varied composition.
Science was an important partner in Monet’s cultivation of his pond and garden. His horticultural interests led to his acquiring specimens of Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac’s new form of water lilies; a botanical invention recognized at the 1889 Exposition Universelle of Paris. At a time when only hardy wild water lilies were available to Europe, Marliac painstakingly and deliberately collected seeds and rhizomes from various species across the world, experimenting for years prior to producing the first hybrid in 1877.
A French lawyer and horticulturalist dedicated to breeding water lily hybrids, Latour-Marliac produced a water lily nursery at Le Temple-sur-Lot in 1875. Monet saw his water lilies at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris and obtained them for his garden in Giverny from Latour-Marliac.
The lily pond’s flowering surface was judiciously maintained by Monet’s gardener, who spent the entire day tending it in the Japanese tradition. Before Monet set up his canvases at dawn, the gardener would row out into the pond in a small, green, flat-bottomed boat to clean its surface, removing any moss, algae or water grasses which grew from the depths. Monet devised ways to insert food wrapped in cloth like a tea bag into the muddy roots so as not to disturb water, which he insisted on keeping crystal clear. He maintained the floating pads in a circular pattern, with unobscured expanses of water between each plant. These in-between spaces of clear water served as reflective surfaces for the sky and inverted landscape imagery.
6.13
| Monet’s Water Lilies as Immersive Experience
Monet’s Water Lilies series is significant, comprising over two hundred and thirty canvases.
The first twenty-five works were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1900. In 1914, the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who was an avid supporter of Monet, urged him to enlarge the cycle project. Two years later the suggestion became a formal state commission for a large series destined for permanent display. The Water Lilies panels were Monet’s main preoccupation from 1920 until at least the summer of 1926 when his strength began to fail.
Clemenceau humorously described the process of setting up the outdoor studio terrain,
We loaded the wheelbarrows, and sometimes even a small farm cart, with a pile of equipment, so as to set up a row of outdoor studios, the easels lined up on the grass for the battle between Monet and the sun. It was a very simple idea, but it had never been tried by any of the great painters… Fourteen paintings were started at the same time, almost like a scale of studies, depicting a single motif that varied according to the effects of the time of day, the sunlight, and the clouds.
As a symbol of peace, Monet gifted the Water Lilies cycle to the French State on the day after the Armistice, November 11, 1918. The twenty-two panels were installed according to a pre-designed plan at l’Orangerie in 1927, just a few months following the artist’s death.
The rest of his canvases remained in his studios until the late 1940s when the Museum of Modern Art as well as private collectors purchased them.
On July 8, 1927, Paul Claudel in Journal Tome I: 1904-1932 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) described the installation at l’Orangerie thus:
At the Orangerie in two large oval rooms the Nymphéas of Claude. Mirrors of water on which drift water lilies at all hours of the day, morning, afternoon, evening and night. Claude Monet at the end of his long life after having studied all the ways in which the different motifs of nature could answer the question of light in terms of assemblages of colour finally addressed himself to the most docile, most penetrable of elements, water, which at once transparency, iridescence, and mirror. Thanks to water he became the painter of what we cannot see. He addressed himself to that almost invisible and spiritual surface which separates light from its reflection. A surface seen only through flowers, the corollas of leaves and of petals, organic emanations from the depths, bubbles, open eggs. There is the same passion for colour in Monet as in the stained-glass window makers of our cathedrals. The colour rises from the bottom of the water in clouds, in swirls.
The chapter ends with short excerpts and accompanying images of the Water Lilies installation by Anthony Portulese from his essay “A Phenomenology of Display: Monet’s L’Orangerie, the Panorama Rotunda, and the History of Proto-Installation” (Rutgers Art Review 37, https://rar.rutgers.edu/a-phenomenology-of-display-monets-lorangerie-the-panorama-rotunda-and-the-history-of-proto-installation-art-by-anthony-portulese/)
The Water Lilies gallery can be thus envisaged as proto-installation art because its custom display practice deploys immersive stratagems that amalgamate the material environment of the physical gallery space and the perceptual field of the visitor’s sensorium.
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Louis Gillet describes the L’Orangerie Water Lilies installation in his book Trois variations sur Claude Monet [Three Perspectives on Claude Monet]. Published in June 1927, just a month after the gallery’s unveiling12, Gillet writes:
Two large ovular rooms, running in the direction of the Seine, two lakes, two rings ingeniously chained to each other, precede a vestibule, ovular as well, but smaller and of different orientation; nothing but curves, ellipses which the floor pavement repeats in a muted manner; bare surfaces, almost without moldings, made only to support the aquatic décor … : all this has an air of liquid movement, elongated fluidity that miraculously lends itself to this slow belt, to this zone of floating, flowing reveries.
Gillet’s description emphasizes these paintings as an experience of “liquid movement” and “floating, flowing reveries” in the distinct space they occupy, rather than as motionless art objects hung on a wall solely for visual consumption.
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As Gillet’s testimonial suggests, they were perceived as a singular, unified arrangement, each brought together through a structural fusion of canvas and winding wall.
The L’Orangerie gallery cannot simply be categorized as an “art installation.” Monet and Lefèvre’s display plan for the Water Lilies murals, which combined the illusory conventions of the panorama rotunda with the ambient devices of installation art, should be recognized as an innovative intervention into the discourses of display that shaped the period.
All the murals in the Water Lilies gallery rooms are two meters in height and installed approximately two feet off the floor. Their low placement in relation to the visitor’s body, coupled with the fact that the murals surpass most people in height, maximizes the sensation of immersion, whereby the visitor feels they may tumble in the vast imagery and plunge into the polychromatic pond. Taking in all parts of the monumental cycle at once proves difficult, even from a distanced viewpoint. This challenge thus entices the visitor to register the different sections of the murals in succession.
In an article published in 1909 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Roger Marx writes that in the Water Lilies series, Monet “finds his pleasure in the enjoyment experienced, throughout the day, in the viewing of a single site.” This statement well encapsulates the fused temporal and spatial parameters of the Water Lilies gallery experience. Advancing this notion of the L’Orangerie Water Lilies as a holistic experience, critic François Monod wrote a review for the journal L’Art et les Artistes in June 1927, wherein he describes Monet’s paintings within the site’s “enveloping” display:
“In each of the two rooms of the Orangerie, a foggy morning effect and twilight effect occupy the ends of the ellipse; on the long sides shine effects of full light during the hours of midday. The only concrete elements of the spectacle are the floating petals of the water-lilies, flames of purple and gold, which, on the large sides, frame the long plunging views, two thin trunks of weeping willows, and a few twigs of their foliage trembling in the breeze. The spectator is enveloped in a bath of aerial quivering, damp moirure, and flickers of clarity.”
The seriality of these in situ paintings offers an altered perception of time, for when viewing the L’Orangerie murals together, the visitor receives the sense that different moments in time—morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, and back to morning—meld into a simultaneous continuum, and in consequence render the experience of time graspable through the experience of space.
The paintings run through a broad palette of color contrasts, with which Monet played in many modulations, such as light-dark, warm-cold, and complementary colors. Coarse areas of texture alternate with dabbing and hatching, where two or more colors can be seen within a single brushstroke. Monet’s rubbing of pasty pigments on top of dried, pastose layerings produces a broken, rough appearance, with streaks of paint so granulose that subsequent swift, thinner strokes would not cover its ridges or penetrate its crevices.
The final result is a canvas of saturated pigmentations and heavy impasto. The incrustations of paint, layer atop layer, texture upon texture, and color over color, summon to the visitor’s consciousness Monet’s hand and very physical painterly process.
The Water Lilies gallery has herein been recognized as a unique artistic site and praised for its panoramic qualities, now with deeper historical contextualization. The architectural design of the Water Lilies gallery engages the visitor’s sight and proprioception. The relationship between its massive paintings and their unique display invites questions regarding the significance of the perceiving, sensing body in art interpretation. Intersecting the panorama traditions of his past and the installation art practices of his future, Monet’s gallery plays host to a phenomenological, embodied mode of artistic contemplation. It propels our notion of the experience of art from a passive spectatorship that hierarchizes vision over other senses, toward an active participation that democratizes them instead.Monet’s garden was a labour of love, a utopian place, and an aesthetic metaphor for peace. This takes on added significance when considering that Monet’s Water Lilies cycle, to be gifted to France, was produced during a time of considerable turmoil for the artist, battling personal tragedies and living through the devastation of the Western Front.
Upon gifting the paintings at war’s end, Monet stated, “I have given my paintings to my country. And I will let my country judge me.”