726. Claude Monet (1840-1926), French,

La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume), 1879.

Oil on canvas, 231.8 x 142.3 cm. Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston. Impressionism.

 

 

Claude Monet

(1840 Paris – 1926 Giverny)

 

In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true Impressionist to the end of his very long life. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain.

Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Eugène Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. Monet did not want to enrol at the École des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, L’Académie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai d’Orfèvres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro.

Later in Gleyre’s studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends.

At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time: seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monet’s work is in line not only with Manet’s Chemin de fer (The Railway) and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear.

In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time.

A friend of Monet’s, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections.