Claude Monet had little interest in giving titles to his paintings; he was content with descriptors like “View of the Village.” The monotony of these generics frustrated Edmond Renoir, brother of the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as he prepared the catalogue for the first avant-garde exhibit in 1874. When he asked Monet what he should call a painting of a sunrise, Monet replied, “Why don’t you just call it ‘Impression’?” And thus the painting was recorded as Impression: Sunrise.
The name caught on. Critics loved it, of course, because of the comedic opportunities it presented. Louis Leroy, in particular, noted derisively: “I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that.”
For his part, Monet generally liked the term, for it captured what he was trying to do: record an “impression” of an instant in time.
Oscar-Claude Monet, son of a shop owner from the French port city of Le Havre, showed remarkable early talent for creating clever caricatures. By the time he quit school at age seventeen, he was earning a good living off his drawings, saving two thousand francs, which he dedicated to building his artistic career. At nineteen, he headed for Paris, where he spent two years studying before being called up for military service. Given his scholarly underachievement, he rather surprisingly enlisted in a crack cavalry regiment that trained in Algeria, but within a year he came down with typhoid and was sent home.
In 1862 Monet was back in Paris, this time at the academy of Charles Gleyre, who taught traditional painting methods, none of which interested Monet. He was already dedicated to plein-air painting, work done outdoors directly from nature, and was well on the way to developing his own style. (Of course, plein-air painting had its risks. Monet was once seriously injured in the leg by a stray discus.) He found kindred spirits in fellow students Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, and one afternoon in 1863, the five artists abandoned Gleyre’s atelier and headed for the countryside to paint. That was the end of Monet’s artistic education.
The year 1865 was a good one for Monet. He met the lovely Camille Doncieux and had a landscape accepted at the Salon, the state’s fomal exhibition. A scant two years later, however, his ambitious Salon submission called Women in the Garden was rejected outright, and Camille was pregnant. Monet’s father, furious that his son had fathered a child, cut off his allowance and demanded that he return to Le Havre. Camille was left alone in Paris to have the baby. Over time, Papa Monet softened enough to pay his son a pittance, but it wasn’t enough to support Camille and baby Jean, so friends were regularly asked for loans.
When his 1869 Salon submissions were rejected, Monet grew so depressed he threw himself into the Seine River. He immediately regretted his rash action. Fortunately, he was a good swimmer.
In the summer of 1869, war with Prussia loomed. As a veteran, Monet faced compulsory conscription, a duty he was desperate to avoid. First, he got hitched, since married men were called up last, and then, when war broke out, he moved his family to London, where they remained for more than a year. They returned to France in the fall of 1871, settling in the small town of Argenteuil, outside Paris. Monet was seeking to free himself from artistic conventions and to paint exactly what he saw, not what he “knew” was there. Academy artists were taught to paint objects in their natural colors (brown bark, blue ocean) and to ignore the effects of light that change colors as perceived by the human eye. Monet reversed this notion. “Try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field,” he advised. “Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here is an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you.” He also sought to create a sense of instantaneity, to show a scene as it was at one moment in time.
After years of rejection by the Salon, Monet latched onto the idea of an independent exhibition, working with Edgar Degas to make the show a reality in 1873. Critics seized on his painting’s title to label the entire group “Impressionist” and brutally attacked the works on display. One critic examined a Paris streetscape called Boulevard des Capucines, imagining a dialogue with the artist: “Will you kindly tell me what all those little black dribbles at the bottom of the picture mean?” the critic asks. “Why, they are pedestrians,” explains the artist. “And that’s what I look like when I walk along the Boulevard des Capucines? Good Heavens! Are you trying to make fun of me?”
AN ARTIST WITH AN EYE FOR THE LADIES, CLAUDE MONET DECLARED, “I ONLY SLEEP WITH DUCHESSES OR MAIDS. PREFERABLY DUCHESSES’ MAIDS. ANYTHING IN BETWEEN TURNS ME RIGHT OFF.”
In 1876, Monet met Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy new patron and owner of one of the first Paris department stores, and the two families became close. When the economy suddenly took a nosedive, commissions ran out, and the Monets were plunged into debt. Even harder hit was Hoschedé: His business failed, and he ran off to Belgium, leaving behind his wife, Alice, and their four children. Monet invited Alice and the kids to live with Camille and their two children in a new house in the remote village of Vétheuil.
Tragically, Camille developed cervical cancer and suffered constant pain. Alice nursed her, kept the household, and tended the children, two of whom were babies. At some point, she also became Monet’s lover, although it’s impossible to know whether it was before or after Camille’s death, in September 1879. Monet painted his wife on her deathbed, although he later described with dismay the way his painter’s mind automatically analyzed the colors of her sick face. So desperately poor was the Monet-Hoschedé ménage that Monet had to beg one of his patrons to retrieve Camille’s favorite golden locket from a Paris pawnshop.
That winter would be the lowest point of Monet’s life. In time, the economy rebounded and patrons returned. In 1883, the couple and their children moved to a house set within a large garden in the village of Giverny, where Monet spent the rest of his life.
In autumn 1890, Monet used the haystacks in local fields as a motif to capture what he liked to call the “envelope” of light and atmosphere. In the end, he completed twenty-five paintings depicting different seasons and times of day, thus composing his first series, the paintings for which today he is best known. There are haystacks in pale winter light, haystacks in spring fog, and haystacks in summer sunsets. When exhibited together in May 1891, the paintings dramatically impacted audiences, who finally understood what Monet had been attempting all along. (Some of the artist’s friends were less understanding; Pissarro, for example, thought Monet was simply repeating himself.) The success of the haystacks convinced Monet to undertake more series—of poplars, of Rouen cathedral, and of London’s Houses of Parliament. He would carry multiple canvases, each noted on the back with the time of day it depicted, and work on them in turn.
In 1891, Ernest Hoschedé died, and the next summer Claude and Alice quietly married. She continued to run the house like clockwork in deference to her husband’s artistic sensibilities; Monet went into the sulks if his dinner or lunch were delayed by dawdling children. When Alice died in 1911, one of her daughters took over the housekeeping. Monet didn’t even allow World War I to disrupt his routine, although the German front line was fewer than forty miles from Giverny.
Increasingly, Monet concentrated on one theme: the water lilies in his garden, the subject of some 250 canvases. During the first world war, he began his most ambitious works: enormous, curved canvases, more than 6½ feet tall and almost 14 feet tall. After the war, with his close friend Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Monet arranged for France to build two oval-shaped rooms in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris especially for these works. By the time the water lilies were installed in 1927, they were an anachronism. Modernism was ascendant and Impressionism was an art of the past. Contemporary artists derided the works as “pretty.” Monet died at Giverny in December 1926 at age eighty-six, little aware of how much art had changed.
Yet the dip in his reputation was short-lived. Today, Monet is one of the most beloved artists of all time—less intimidating than Leonardo da Vinci and saner than Vincent van Gogh. His paintings have been translated into every conceivable consumer item: You can play with the limited edition Waterlily Barbie, entertain your infant with Baby Monet videos, and create your own Impressionist water lilies with a paint-by-numbers kit.
In the early 1900s, Monet started to notice he was having trouble with his vision. He was well aware of Edgar Degas’ blindness and feared the same fate for himself. Fortunately, he was diagnosed with cataracts, a treatable ailment; however, in the early twentieth century cataract surgery was far more dangerous than it is today, and Monet put it off until 1920. When he was finally able to return to the studio, Monet viewed his own paintings with shock. Before his surgery, the yellowish-brown cataract had shifted his perception until the blue portion of the spectrum was almost completely invisible. To compensate, Monet had been painting everything in tones of red and yellow. After the surgery, blues came flooding back, to the point that he couldn’t see reds. It took several months for Monet’s vision to return to normal.
Many joked that the artist painted in an Impressionist blur because he was nearly blind. Not so. Monet’s paintings were as “unfocused” in his thirties as in his seventies. But the cataract did change the way he saw the world. Paul Cézanne said famously that Monet was “only an eye—but, my God, what an eye!”
MAID MAN
While studying art in Paris, Monet wowed all the female models with his handsome features, well-cut clothes, and fashionable lace cuffs. “Sorry,” the artist told them, “I only sleep with duchesses or maids. Preferably duchesses’ maids. Anything in between turns me right off.”
Monet didn’t hesitate to effect distinguished airs to advance his interests. In 1877, he wanted to paint the Gare Saint-Lazare train station and decided the light would be best if the train for Rouen was delayed a half hour. Unfortunately, railways don’t usually adjust their schedules for impoverished artists. Renoir describes what happened next:
He put on his best clothes, ruffled the lace at his wrists, and twirling his gold-headed cane went off to the office of the Western Railway, where he sent in his card to the director.… He announced the purpose of his visit. “I have decided to paint your station. For some time I’ve been hesitating between your station and the Gare du Nord, but I think yours has more character.” He was given permission to do what he wanted. The trains were all halted; the platform cleared; the engines were crammed with coal so as to give out all the smoke Monet desired. Monet established himself in the station as a tyrant and painted amid respectful awe. He finally departed with half-a-dozen or so pictures, while the entire personnel, the Director of the Company at their head, bowed him out.
Impressed by his grand manner, the Western Railway staff had no idea they were dealing with an artistic outcast, an “intransigent” constantly rejected by the official Salon. Renoir concluded with amazement, “I wouldn’t have even dared to paint in the front window of the corner grocer!”
