Despite his lack of money, Monet painted passionately and unceasingly. His large portrait of Camille, his companion, was admired by the critics ‚ at the Salon of 1866. The next year, however, to his great despair, his Women in the Garden was refused by a jury increasingly hostile to the young generation of experimenters.

Now a father, Monet was obliged to seek financial support from his friends. He found lodgings in Bougival, outside Paris, that would permit him to paint in the open air, as he wanted. Renoir was his closest neighbor. Together they went to La Grenouillere, a floating restaurant on the Seine frequented by Sunday canoers, where they used rapidly applied flecks and commalike brushstrokes of brilliant hue to convey movement and life, and especially to capture the effect of shimmering water.

The Franco-Prussian War erupted in July 1870. Monet left France for London, where he joined Pissarro and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought several paintings from him. Back in France, he settled with his family in Argenteuil, on the Seine close to Paris, where his painting acquired a new luminescence. He suppressed dark shadows and developed a deliberately imprecise manner of delineating form. He also juxtaposed bright colors, making them vibrate with one another by applying thick strokes directly onto a white ground.

Monet and his friends decided to organize an exhibition on their own, without jury or prizes, with, among others, Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro, and Degas. The show opened its doors on April 15, 1874, in the studio of the photographer Nadar. It was on this occasion that a critic, commenting on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, coined what was intended to be a derisive term, “Impressionist.” His response was typical; the press covered the exhibition with ridicule.

In 1877 Monet left Argenteuil to settle close to the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris. Like Gustave Caillebotte and Manet before him, he was tempted by the theme of the railroad. This aspect of modern life attracted him, he set up his easel beneath the large shed roof of the station to paint the locomotives arriving amid clouds of smoke.

Eventually Monet decided to return to the countryside, where he could paint nature. After the death of Camille in 1879 he travelled constantly, carrying his canvases and boxes of pigments with him. He finally found the house of his dreams in Giverny, on a stream close to the Seine, where he moved in 1883.

Monet was now fifty years old and already famous, with exhibitions of his work becoming more frequent. His [painting continued to evolve. In 1890 he began hi9s first series of grain stacks. Then, in 1895 another series, of Rouen Cathedral. The exhibition of these works, painted at different times of the day was a revelation to the public, who were astonished by their formal nuances and chromatic subtlety.

Giverny, where Monet planted an elaborate garden with a lily pond, now became his principal focus. In 1909 he exhibited a series of water lily painting as, in which the viewers gaze becomes lost in coloured reflections. Despite the death of Alice in 1910 and the outbreak of war in 1914 Monet continued to pain with passion.

In 1918, to celebrate the armistice, he presented France with an ensemble of panoramic water lily paintings now permanently installed in the Orangerie Museum in Paris. These constituted the final statement of the artist, whose innovative work here approached abstraction. Monet died at Giverny in 1926.

Article courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from the French by John Goodman, ediited by Brigitte Govignon. The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing ,experts in premium quality canvas prints.

“A clear example of Monet’s influence can be noted in the change in Degas’s art after the middle 1870s when his color began to approach that of the other Impressionists and he employed techniques, particularly in pastel, that gave to the whole a more granular, broken, and flickering effect – qualities not found in his earlier work. That is true also of Czanne, Pissarro and Renoir. Monet showed the way, even if the development of the others seemed to diverge from his.

“There is still another reason for Monet’s outstanding position as an Impressionist. If we compare his paintings over a short period with the paintings of the others, we see that while the others painted within a restricted range of ideas and even of feelings, so that the Renoirs of the period 1873-76 are characterized by the joyousness in a collective world of recreation described earlier, Monet, with his powerful, ever alert eye, was able to paint at the same time brilliant pictures and also rather grayed ones in neutral tones. He was more reactive, he had more of that quality that psychologists of that time called “Impressionability.” That is to say, he was open to more varied stimuli from the common world that for these painters was the evident source of the subjects of their paintings.

“Monet could appear variable at any given moment, producing many surprising interpretations of the common matter. He altered his technique according to his sense of the quality of the whole, whether joyous or somber, that he wanted to construct in response to the powerful stimulus from the object that engaged him in the act of painting. Similarly, over the course of years, his art underwent a most remarkable general transformation. The early work of Monet appears as a painting of directly seen objects characterized by great mobility and variety. His art is a world of streets and harbors, beaches and roads, and resorts usually filled with human beings or showing many traces of human play and activity. In the late work, however, Monet excluded the human figure. There are practically no portraits and no figure paintings by Monet after the middle 1880s and few between 1879 and 1885. From that period, we can count all his figure paintings on one hand. He also gave up still life and painted no genre groups. He restricted himself to an increasingly silent and solitary world.

“When Monet traveled to Venice and London, he pictured those great cities from a distance, in fog or sunlight, without the clear presence of human beings and with no suggestion of their movement through that space. He tended, moreover, to shift from the painting of large to small fields; and, whereas at first the large fields were painted on small canvases, later he painted a small field – water in a nearby pool or a few flowers in his garden – life-size and seemingly larger than life, as if he wished to give a maximum concreteness and the most intimate presence to a small space that, although only a segment, was for him a complete world. He moved in his art from a world with deep, horizontal planes in long perspectives – the paths of carriages and traffic – to a world in which the plane of the water or the ground seen from close by has been tilted upward and has become vertical, like the plane of a picture or mirror. The quality of landscape as the extended human environment, the old traversability of space, has been minimized in the later work.

“Monet offers one of the most extraordinary transformations known in the lifework of an artist. But it does relate to an observed trait of many artists in their old age. An attempt has been made to characterize in broad terms a style of old age – what the Germans call an Alterstil – as if the late works of Titian, Rembrandt Tintoretto,and Monet must have something in common. In old age they lived presumably more within themselves than in the “world,” and from this tendency of aged artists seems to flow certain characteristics of their art. This theory rests on an arbitrary selection of old artists, however, and one can point to Ingres whose last pictures, such as The Turkish Bath, painted in his eighties, are of an indomitable sensuality and sometimes surprisingly naive and tangible in the voluptuousness of the forms. Or Pissarro, the fellow painter of Monet, who, beginning with idyllic pastoral subjects, painted in his old age streets and crowds, steamboats, factories, and people, the reverse of the process that we have observed in Monet.

“Besides his academic nudes, Renoir began by painting the sociability of his own world – pictures of his artist friends and the pleasures of Paris; but as he grew older, he withdrew from this public world. He still represented human figures, even more passionately than before. But they are completely domestic figures – a child, the nurse, the mistress, the wife, always a figure presented in an intimate relation to the observer or the painter. Monet never painted a nude, and one may suspect that his vast world of nature and the theme of water played in his art the role that the fantasy about women or children or mothers played in the imagination of other artists. All his variety, from the stillness of the lilly pond to the awful turbulence of waves beating on the rocks, may have to do with the feelings or passions that in other artists can be recognized in their mythology and subjects or through a fanciful imagery of human figures.”

- Text from “Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions”, by Meyer Schapiro

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