Monet

James H. Rubin

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780500775066
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Claude Monet (18401926) is one of the most admired and famous painters of all time, and the architect of Impressionism: a revolution that gave birth to modern art. His technique painting out of doors, at the seashore or in the city streets was as radically new as his subject matter, the landscapes and middle-class pastimes of a newly industrialized Paris. Painting with an unprecedented immediacy and authenticity, Monet claimed that his work was something new: both natural and true. In this new introductory study, James H. Rubin one of the worlds foremost specialists in 19th-century French art traces the development of Monets practice, from his early work as a caricaturist to the late paintings of waterlilies and his garden at Giverny. Rubin explores the cultural currents that helped to shape Monets work: the utopian thought that gave rise to his politics; his interest in Japanese prints, gardening, and trends in the decorative arts; and his relationship with earlier French landscape painters as well as such contemporaries as Manet and Renoir.

Chapter 1

Defying Traditions: From Caricaturist to Career

Monet was not a tall man. His physique was solidly average, perhaps slightly athletic, but, linked to his sometimes gruff character, he could be imposing. Throughout his life, like most French men of his time, he wore a beard, which was often stained by tar from constantly smoking pipes and cigarettes.[2] Aside from innate talent, stubbornness and ambition, Monet was blessed with a prosperous enough family that money was absent from his concerns when he first chose his career. He had the self-confidence and security of many bourgeois raised during a period of relative stability, prosperity and optimism. Soon, however, perhaps because of the contrast to his relatively secure childhood, money became a primary concern; he often begged for loans or handouts. He was passionate and driven, setting the highest standards for his work, destroying many paintings he deemed failures, while constantly complaining about the weather or what he claimed were his artistic inadequacies. At the same time, he was a devoted family man. He worked long and hard to earn what eventually, when he reached his fifties, became a comfortable living. In his business dealings he was meticulous and could be tough-minded. Once successful he insisted on high prices for his work. In the end, his imagery and his workaholic ethos so amply embodied the values of his social class and culture that he became wildly successful beyond any progressive artist’s dreams.

2 Self-Portrait with a Beret, c. 1886.

Monet was born in Paris in 1840, but at the death of his uncle the family moved to Le Havre, where Monet’s father partnered with his widowed sister-in-law (Monet’s aunt) in an import-export company with headquarters on the Le Havre waterfront. They were prominent members of the business community in a seaport noted for international trade and transatlantic passenger service at the delta of the River Seine, which flows northward through Paris to the English Channel and was a major trade and tourist route. From the upper-storey window of the aunt’s villa, one could look out beyond the shore, where the traffic is headed towards the harbour, to the left beyond the frame of Monet’s celebrated painting of the view.[3]

3 The Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.

Located on a cliff just over the Le Havre city boundary in the suburb of Sainte-Adresse, Madame Sophie Lecadre’s house, its garden and its panoramic view were among the bourgeois comforts Monet had sacrificed in order to pursue his career. Following his experience painting with Boudin and the Dutch sea and boat painter Johan Jongkind – to whose example Monet also gave great credit – Monet travelled to Paris, the capital of Western art, to educate himself and visit the Louvre, the world’s greatest museum.[4] Rather than enrol at the École des Beaux-Arts (usually referred to as the Academy), Monet signed up for the open-admission studio run by a model named Suisse. There he met several free-thinking young painters, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Frédéric Bazille, who would become his closest cohorts among the Impressionists. As to the museum, he was little moved by what he saw of Old Masters, preferring landscape paintings as his focus. We learn from his early letters that he spent far more time painting out in the country than he did studying indoors.

4 Eugène Boudin, Empress Eugénie on the Beach at Trouville, 1863.

At this early time in Monet’s formation the dominant trends in art were Classicism, Romanticism and Realism, represented primarily by three renowned painters, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, and the somewhat younger and politically militant Gustave Courbet. Ingres defended a conservative stylistic tradition in which forms were based on sharply drawn outlines – a so-called ‘linear’ style – and colour came second, filling in forms after they had been defined by line.[5] This technique exemplified the academic style against which progressive artists would rebel. Delacroix was known for following an opposing tradition in which forms were created primarily from a build-up of pigments, hence from colour, in a style now sometimes called ‘painterly’ but at the time known as ‘colourist’.[6] The opposition between line and colour dated back to seventeenth-century academic disputes, and although Ingres and Delacroix had in common themes that with a few exceptions never touched on the modern world or contemporary history, they were considered polar opposites because of their differing techniques. Ingres’s paintings were highly finished, Delacroix’s more liberally and loosely handled, although both revealed the exquisite skills – however different – with which each painted. Delacroix was considered progressive, and he associated with literary and intellectual circles that shared liberal and democratic views. He was barred from the Academy until late in his life, as well as sometimes from the public exhibition called the Salon, which was sponsored by government and held biannually at the Louvre. The Impressionists would use his expressive colour and brushwork as resources for themselves.

5 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Virgin of the Host, 1854.

6 Eugène Delacroix, The Lion Hunt, 1860–1.

When the Realist Courbet burst onto the scene, however, a new opposition emerged. Courbet was steeped in socialist theories, and his large paintings of common people and contemporary events from the provinces challenged many prevailing assumptions, for they were understood to be both politically and aesthetically radical. He changed the discourse from the stylistic one of line versus colour to one related to thematic content – whether it should idealize the past or reflect contemporary reality. In his Realist manifesto, Courbet proclaimed that his aim was to ‘translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation of it’. His principles laid the groundwork for Impressionism by combining observation of immediate reality with his own view of it, that is, objectivity and subjectivity, the observed and the personal. Authenticity, called ‘sincerity’ at mid-century, was the only way to truth, which in turn would be the only way to social and political progress. Courbet’s contemporary subject matter had political connotations, but in addition he made the importance of landscape in this social role of art paramount by placing a large scene of his home countryside on the easel at the centre of his huge painting-manifesto called The Studio of the Painter.[7] The picture was in fact a grandiose self-portrait he called a ‘Real Allegory’ because it showed his landscape painting supported by progressive thinkers, placed behind him to the right, and as an alternative to false ideals, situated to the left. Realist art, he believed – that is, telling truth by showing it – was a powerful expression of both artistic freedom from convention, and a guide to justice in the future. Monet met and painted with Courbet on the Normandy beaches, but he was less interested in politics than in Courbet’s technique, which was loose and spontaneous, much closer to the colourist concept than to the academic. Nevertheless, Monet’s paintings and those of his cohorts would at first be received as politically challenging, following on Courbet’s precedent.

7 Gustave Courbet, The Studio of the Painter, 1855.

Prior to Courbet and then parallel to his career lasting through the 1860s, the most advanced landscape painting in France was produced by a group of artists called the Barbizon School, named for a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris. The forest belonged to the domain of the royal chateau of Fontainebleau and had been preserved as a hunting ground. Apart from a limited lumbering concession, it was off limits to exploitation. Its trees were thus old growth, and it was remarkable for rock outcroppings, boulders strewn about, and little ponds left behind by the retreating glaciers of the ice age. Accessible by coach and eventually by train from Paris, it became a hikers’ paradise and a haunt for artists – a refuge from the crowds and pressures of the city. Artists especially appreciated it both because it was not far from the art market centred in Paris and because its relatively unspoiled landscapes and panoramas recalled the kind of natural settings extolled in writings by the eighteenth-century Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The latter saw nature as a realm of freedom and purity uncorrupted by restrictive conventions of modern society. Paintings by Théodore Rousseau (no relation to Jean-Jacques) evoked Earth’s ancient origins; paintings of peasants by Jean-François Millet represented a disappearing agrarian society whose simple virtues stood in opposition to urban capitalism and industrialized labour. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot loved the silvery mists of the Île de France’s often cloudy weather. The younger Charles-François Daubigny, who Monet knew better than the others, found serene beauty in less spectacular scenes along the Oise river north of Paris. Barbizon paintings, in other words, were often infused with nostalgic effects, which the Impressionists generally avoided.

In the early 1860s, Monet made several wonderful pictures during visits to Chailly, a village slightly north of Barbizon.[8] Although his Barbizon predecessors made many studies out of doors and painted in a loosely colourist manner, Monet’s pictures differed by his broader execution, with wider, heavier and more fragmented brushstrokes, sometimes emulating Courbet’s palette-knife technique. He also used more boldly contrasting colours than the Barbizon painters, even when muted by the autumn season. These paintings come off as less moody and, like Daubigny, less picturesque, more matter of fact than his elders’. Monet’s emphatic handling of shadow and the light filtering through branches created pictorial drama rather than a sense of melancholy solitude.

8 The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest, 1865.

At this same time in the early 1860s another painter shocked the public as much as Courbet had in the 1850s, but for different reasons. His name was Édouard Manet. Because he painted with broad strokes – one already saw them emulated in Monet’s Bodmer Oak – and a palette far brighter than Courbet’s still traditional colours, he is generally included among the Impressionists, although he refused to exhibit with them. (He insisted that the official Salon was where one should confront the public with a novel way of painting.) Manet was already admired by some artists prior to 1863, but it was in that year that the Salon jury rejected so many works, including Manet’s, that French Emperor Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon I) decreed in response to artists’ protests that an annexe would be opened. Those wishing to exhibit their rejected works could do so, and the public could judge for itself. This additional showing is known famously as the Salon des Refusés, and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe – literally Luncheon on the Grass, but known in art history by its French title – became its most memorable picture.[9] Its realistically represented naked woman posed with two men wearing student garb sparked a predictable controversy. To concentrate the viewer’s atten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Defying Traditions: From Caricaturist to Career
• Chapter 2: Defining Impressionism: Aspects of Modernity
• Chapter 3: Interludes and Crises: Personal, Public and Pictorial
• Chapter 4: The Picturesque as Turning Point: Travels, Sites and Series
• Chapter 5: Poetry in the Garden: The Decorative, the ‘Water Lilies’ and Art Nouveau
• Chapter 6: Vision and Subjectivity: Seeing with the Body
• Chapter 7: Political Contexts: Nationalism and Utopia
• Chapter 8: A Lasting Legacy: The Patriarch of Modern Art
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Illustrations
• Index
• Marketing Page