Musée Marmottan Monet
PAINTINGS OF GIVERNY (1883-1926)
NYMPHEAS AND LARGE-SCALE CANVASES
The Marmottan has the best collection of works by the master Impressionist Claude Monet. In this mansion on the southwest fringe of urban Paris, you can walk through Monet’s life, from black-and-white sketches to colorful open-air paintings to the canvas that gave Impressionism its name. The museum’s highlights are scenes of his garden at Giverny, including larger-than-life water lilies. In addition, the Marmottan features a world-class collection of works by Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot.
Paul Marmottan (1856-1932) lived here amid his collection of exquisite 19th-century furniture and paintings. He donated his home and possessions to a private trust (which is why your Museum Pass isn’t valid here). After Marmottan’s death, the more daring art of Monet and others was added. The combination of the mansion, the furnishings, the Impressionist and Empire paintings, and the many Monet masterpieces makes the Marmottan an aesthetic pleasure.
Cost: €11, not covered by Museum Pass; €18.50 combo-ticket with Claude Monet’s home and garden at Giverny gives you line-skipping privileges at Giverny (see here).
Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu until 21:00, closed Mon.
Getting There: It’s on Paris’ west end at 2 Rue Louis-Boilly.
By Métro: Take Métro line 9 to La Muette. Cross the street to the brown Marmottan sign, then follow signs down Chaussée de la Muette (turns into Avenue Ranelagh) through the delightful park, with its old-time kiddie carousel, to the museum (six blocks, 10 minutes). Make the most of the long trip here and combine a visit to the Marmottan with Trocadéro-area sights, a short Métro ride away (see here).
By RER (handy from Rue Cler): Catch the RER-C from Austerlitz, St-Michel, Orsay, Invalides, or Pont de l’Alma (board any train called NORA or GOTA), get off at the Boulainvilliers stop, and follow signs to sortie Rue des Vignes. Turn right up Rue Boulainvilliers, then turn left down Chaussée de la Muette to reach the museum. When returning to your hotel on the RER, make sure your stop is listed on the monitor: You don’t want to end up in Versailles.
By Bus: Handy east-west bus #63 (see here) gets you close, but it requires a walk of about 600 yards. Get off at the Octave Feuillet stop on Avenue Henri Martin, cross Avenue Henri Martin, and follow the tree-lined street to the right that curves around to the museum.
Information: Tel. 01 44 96 50 33, www.marmottan.fr.
Tours: An audioguide is available for €3.
Length of This Tour: Allow one hour.
Photography: Not allowed.
Cuisine Art: Cafés, boulangeries, and bistros are 10 minutes away around the La Muette Métro stop (Rue Mozart has good choices).
Family Tip: The park in front of the museum is terrific for families with small kids. Parents can take turns: While one visits the museum, the other can stay outside with the children.
Starring: Claude Monet, including Impression: Sunrise (shown at the top of this chapter); paintings of Rouen Cathedral, Gare St. Lazare, and Houses of Parliament; scenes from Giverny; and water lilies.
The Marmottan mansion has three pleasant, manageable floors, all worth perusing. (You might be free to see them in any order or, depending on crowd flow, be directed along a specific route.) The ground floor has several rooms of Paul Marmottan’s period furnishings and paintings. Upstairs is the permanent collection, featuring illuminated manuscripts and works by Monet’s fellow Impressionists—Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and especially Berthe Morisot. Monet’s works—the core of the collection—are in the basement.
Because the museum rotates its large collection of paintings, this chapter is not designed as a room-by-room tour. Use it as a general background on Monet’s life and some of the paintings you’re likely to encounter. Read it once before you go, then let the museum surprise you.
• You’ll enter the museum on the ground floor. Descending the stairs to the basement, you’re immediately plunged into the colorful and messy world of Claude Monet. You may be greeted by paintings from his beloved home at Giverny, and portraits of the man himself.
In this one long room, you’ll find some 50 paintings by Monet spanning his lifetime. They’re generally (and very roughly) arranged in chronological order—from Monet’s youthful discovery of Impressionism, to his mature “series” paintings, to his last great water lilies from Giverny.
Claude Monet was the leading light of the Impressionist movement that revolutionized painting in the 1870s. Fiercely independent and dedicated to his craft, Monet gave courage to Renoir and other like-minded artists, who were facing harsh criticism.
You may see a timeline that lets you survey Monet’s long life:
Born in Paris in 1840, Monet grew up in seaside Le Havre as the son of a grocer and began his art career sketching caricatures of townspeople. He realized he had a gift for quickly capturing an overall impression with a few simple strokes. Monet defied his family, insisted he was an artist, and sketched the world around him—beaches, boats, and small-town life. Fellow artist Eugène Boudin encouraged Monet to don a scarf, set up his easel outdoors, and paint the scene exactly as he saw it. Today, we say, “Well, duh!” But “open-air” painting was unorthodox for artists of the day, who were trained to study their subjects thoroughly in the perfect lighting of a controlled studio setting.
At 19, Monet went to Paris but refused to enroll in the official art schools. His letters to friends make it clear he was broke and paying the price for his bohemian lifestyle.
In 1867—the same year the Salon rejected his work—his first child, Jean, was born to Monet and his partner Camille. They moved to the countryside of Argenteuil, where he developed his open-air, Impressionist style. Impression: Sunrise was his landmark work at the breakthrough 1874 Impressionist Exhibition. He went on to paint several series of scenes, such as Gare Saint-Lazare, at different times of day. His career was gaining steam.
After the birth of their second son, Michel, Camille’s health declined, and she later died. Monet traveled a lot, painting landscapes (Bordighera), people (Portrait de Poly), and more series, including the famous Cathedral of Rouen. In 1890, he settled down at his farmhouse in Giverny and married Alice Hoschede. He traveled less, but visited London to paint the Halls of Parliament. Mostly, he painted his own water lilies and flowers in an increasingly messy style. He died in 1926 a famous man.
While living at Argenteuil, Monet and Camille played host to Renoir, Edouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, and other painters. Monet led them on open-air painting safaris to the countryside. Inspired by the realism of Manet, they painted everyday things—landscapes, seascapes, street scenes, ladies with parasols, family picnics—in bright, basic colors.
They began perfecting the distinct Impressionist style—painting nature as a mosaic of short brushstrokes of different colors placed side by side, suggesting shimmering light.
First, Monet simplified. In On the Beach at Trouville (Sur la Plage à Trouville, 1870-1871), a lady’s dress is a few thick strokes of paint. Monet gradually broke things down into smaller dots of different shades. If you back up from a Monet canvas, the pigments blend into one (for example, red plus green plus yellow equals a brown boat). Still, they never fully resolve, creating the effect of shimmering light. Monet limited his palette to a few bright basics—cobalt blue, white, yellow, two shades of red, and emerald green abound. But no black—even shadows are a combination of bright colors.
Monet’s constant quest was to faithfully reproduce nature in blobs of paint. His eye was a camera lens set at a very slow shutter speed to admit maximum light. Then he “developed” the impression made on his retina with an oil-based solution.
In search of new light and new scenes, Monet traveled throughout France and Europe, painting landscapes in all kinds of weather. Picture Monet at work, hiking to a remote spot—carrying an easel, several canvases, brushes (large-size), a palette, tubes of paint (an invention that made open-air painting practical), food and drink, a folding chair, and an umbrella—and wearing his trademark hat, with a cigarette on his lip. He weathered the elements, occasionally putting himself in danger by clambering on cliffs to get the scenes he wanted.
The key was to work fast, before the weather changed and the light shifted, completely changing the colors. Monet worked “wet-in-wet,” applying new paint before the first layer dried, mixing colors on the canvas, and piling them up into a thick paste.
• Monet’s most famous “impression” was the one that gave the movement its name.
This is the painting that started the revolution—a simple, serene view of boats bobbing under an orange sun (see the photo that opens this chapter). At the first public showing by Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others in Paris in 1874, critics howled at this work and ridiculed the title. “Wallpaper,” one called it. The sloppy brushstrokes and ordinary subject looked like a study, not a finished work. The style was dubbed “Impressionist”—an accurate name.
The misty harbor scene obviously made an “impression” on Monet, who faithfully rendered the fleeting moment in quick strokes of paint. The waves are simple horizontal brushstrokes. The sun’s reflection on the water is a few thick, bold strokes of orange tipped with white. They zigzag down the canvas the way a reflection shifts on moving water.
Monet’s claim to fame became a series of paintings of a single scene, captured at different times of day under different light. He first explored the idea with one of Paris’ train stations, Gare St. Lazare, in the 1870s. Soon, he conceived paintings to be shown as a group, giving a time-lapse view of a single subject.
In Rouen, he rented several rooms offering different angles overlooking the Rouen Cathedral. He worked on up to 14 different canvases at a time, shuffling the right one onto the easel as the sun moved across the sky. The cathedral is made of brown stone, but at sunset it becomes gold and pink with blue shadows, softened by thick smudges of paint. The true subject is not the cathedral but the full spectrum of light that bounces off it.
He did another series in London. Turning his hotel room into a studio, Monet—working on nearly a hundred canvases simultaneously—painted the changing light on the River Thames. He caught the reflection of the Houses of Parliament on the river’s surface, stretching and bending with the current. London’s famous fog epitomized Monet’s favorite subject—the atmosphere that distorts distant objects. That filtering haze gives even different-colored objects a similar tone, resulting in a more harmonious picture. When the light was just right and the atmosphere glowed, the moment of “instantaneity” had arrived, and Monet worked like a madman.
Monet started many of his canvases in the open air and then painstakingly perfected them later in the studio. He composed his scenes with great care—clear horizon lines give a strong horizontal axis, while diagonal lines (of trees or shorelines) create solid triangles.
These series—of London, the cathedral, haystacks, poplars, and mornings on the Seine—were very popular. Monet, poverty-stricken until his mid-40s, was slowly becoming famous, first in America, then London, and finally in France. He soon took up residence in what would be his home for the rest of his life, Giverny.
In 1883, Monet’s brood settled into a farmhouse in Giverny (50 miles west of Paris, see here). Financially stable and domestically blissful, he turned Giverny into a garden paradise and painted nature without the long commute.
In 1890, Monet started work on his Japanese garden, inspired by tranquil scenes from the Japanese prints he collected. He diverted a river to form a pond, planted willows and bamboo on the shores, filled the pond with water lilies, then crossed it with this wooden footbridge. As years passed, the bridge became overgrown with wisteria. Compare several versions. He painted the bridge at different times of day and year, exploring different color schemes.
Monet uses the bridge as the symmetrical center of simple, pleasing designs. The water is drawn with horizontal brushstrokes that get shorter as you move up the canvas (farther away), creating the illusion of distance. The horizontal water contrasts with the vertical willows, while the bridge “bridges” the sides of the square canvas and laces the scene together.
In 1912, Monet began to go blind. Cataracts distorted his perception of depth and color and sent him into a tailspin of despair. The (angry?) red paintings date from this period.
As his vision slowly failed, Monet concentrated on painting close-ups of the surface of the pond and its water lilies—red, white, yellow, and lavender. Some lilies are just a few broad strokes on a bare canvas (a study); others are piles of paint formed with overlapping colors.
But more than the lilies, the paintings focus on the changing reflections on the surface of the pond. Pan slowly around the room and watch the pond go from predawn to bright sunlight to twilight.
Early lily paintings show the shoreline as a reference point. But increasingly, Monet crops the scene ever closer, until there is no shoreline, no horizon, no sense of what’s up or down. Stepping back from the canvas, you see the lilies just hang there on the museum wall, suspended in space. The surface of the pond and the surface of the canvas are one. Modern abstract art—a colored design on a flat surface—is just around the corner.
• The climax of the visit is a round room (with benches), where you can immerse yourself in the...
Get close—Monet did—and analyze the trunk. Rough “brown” bark is made of thick strokes (an inch wide and four inches long) of pink, purple, orange, and green. Impressionism lives. But to get these colors to resolve in your eye, you’d have to back up all the way to Giverny.
In the midst of the chaos of World War I, Monet began a series of large-scale paintings of water lilies. They were installed at the Orangerie (for information, see the 
Orangerie Museum Tour chapter). Here at the Marmottan are smaller-scale studies for that series.
Some lilies are patches of thick paint circled by a squiggly “caricature” of a lily pad. Monet simplifies in a way that Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso would envy. But getting close, you can see that the simple smudge of paint that composes the flower is actually a complex mix of different colors. The sheer size of these studies (and his Orangerie canvases) is impressive.
When Monet died in 1926, he was a celebrity. Starting with meticulous line drawings, he had evolved into an open-air realist, then Impressionist color analyst, then serial painter, and finally master of reflections. In the latter half of his life, Monet’s world shrank—from the broad vistas of the world traveler to the tranquility of his home, family, and garden. But his artistic vision expanded as he painted smaller details on bigger canvases and helped invent modern abstract art.
• After seeing Monet, visit the rest of the Marmottan; it’s worth browsing.
The ground floor and permanent collection upstairs show off Paul Marmottan’s eclectic tastes. On the ground floor are his furnishings, which tended toward the Empire style: high-polished mahogany with upholstery featuring classical motifs like laurel wreaths and torches and brass highlights. Chairs have arched backs, armrests, and tapered legs. The paintings are also from this period, when the French bourgeoisie reigned supreme. You’ll see portraits of ladies wearing tiaras and gentlemen in high-collared suits. They were painted in the seamless-brushstroke style that Monet rebelled against.
Upstairs, in the permanent collection, look for Napoleon’s bed and a portrait of him at 30, having just been appointed consul. You’ll see works that look famous—statues by Canova and scenes of Venice by Canaletto—but most are by their students. A darkened room displays the Marmottan’s excellent medieval collection: illuminated manuscripts (that is, colorfully illustrated books), musical scores, stained glass, and miniature paintings of saints and Bible scenes.
The highlight of the permanent collection is an ever-changing display of works by Monet’s fellow Impressionists—Degas, Pissarro, Gauguin, Renoir—who were also his colleagues and friends. Special attention is often given to Berthe Morisot (see the sidebar).
• You’ve reached the end of the tour. From here, if you need a taxi, you’ll find a stand at the La Muette Métro stop. Or, if you’re up for a post-museum stroll, it’s a pleasant one-hour walk (without stops) from here to the Eiffel Tower along Rue de Passy, one of Paris’ most pleasant (and upscale) shopping streets. To reach Rue de Passy, head east up Chaussée de la Muette, past the La Muette Métro stop—follow that tower. After Rue de Passy ends, you could continue straight—on Boulevard Delessert—all the way to the Eiffel Tower.