Monet and the Impressionists
Monet and his circle of Impressionist artists are perhaps the most loved group of artists of any time, spanning many nationalities, not limited to Western taste. Their popularity lies in the exuberance with how they handle paint and the many scenes of outdoor life. It is worth revisiting some of the works and reasons why Monet and his contemporaries remain so extraordinarily popular.
The Impressionists are Here to Stay
'Among the experiences that are now an indelible part of our culture is the Impressionist vision of nature', wrote John Rewald, one of Impressionism's most eloquent apologists in recent time. Rewald hadn't entirely foreseen the unwavering popularity of the painting from this era, which has become something of its own industry. So adored are Monet and his contemporaries to the art-going eyes of both East and West, that his comment could easily be altered to read: '…an indelible part of our culture is the Impressionist exhibition’.
What a relief then that Monet produced so many paintings, so as to make the likelihood of anyone seeing them all next to nil. There is plenty to go around. While it is easy to be cynical about the rather over-regular diet of Impressionist shows served up to the public at any time, anywhere, when in the presence of some of the best examples of the painting of this time, any concerns temporarily subside, and their allure appears self-evident.
For Monet’s unflagging appeal lies in the directness and sensuous poignancy he reminds of what it is to be alive, not in any moral sense, but by the vividness with which we partake in his world, which he always sought to encounter as innocently fresh. In so doing, we are encouraged to re-experience our own sensory perceptions with invigorated daring.
Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), 1872; the painting that gave its name to the style and artistic movement. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Via Wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet,_Impression,_soleil_levant.jpg
One of the Best Collections of Monet’s Work
One of the best collections of Monet in the world is from the Boston Museum Fine of Art. The other characteristic of this array of works is that it comes almost entirely from John Singer Sargent's advice, himself a highly recognized painter. From his advice, Monets began to trickle into the MFA's collection from 1889 onward, when Monet had just entered into a living legend, and when his paintings, from today's point of view, were still incredibly affordable.
To those who know this and know Sargent's painting, it is easy to see a relationship worth reflecting upon briefly. At his best, a portraitist, Sargent's fame rested on the way he made Impressionism's liberal painterliness palatable to a broader, middle-class audience.
Portrait of Lady Speyer. 1907. By John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lady_Speyer_by_John_Singer_Sargent.jpg
Sargent’s best works are exquisitely rendered and have penetrating psychological honesty, but at his worst, he could be a frivolous aestheticist, something of which is greater contemporary, Whistler, was highly conscious. But it is his fine aestheticism that underscores this collection (and this is not to discount those that were gifted and bequested to the MFA), which as an ensemble is distinguished for its beauty and crispness.
Monet, the Tireless Experimenter
This is not to say that many of Monet’s paintings aren’t otherwise, but it one of the unfortunate effects of media-hyped genius to cast a reverential glow over everything an artist produced. It can be easy forget that no artist’s output was consistent, except perhaps ones of whom only a small number survive, like Vermeer, but even that’s debatable.
For Monet was a tireless experimenter – he famously referred to his production as ‘mes recherches’, a phrase that tellingly doubles as both ‘my searches’ and ‘my researches’ – and not all paintings were necessarily intended to have the same destiny. Monet was an obsessive visual devourer, ‘all eye’ as Cézanne said, and an artist who willingly let his senses get ahead of him.
Hence some paintings were inevitably botched due to lack of control, misjudgment, exhaustion, or irritability.
Woodgatherers at the Edge of the Forest. Circa 1863. By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monet_-_Woodgatherers_at_the_Edge_of_the_Forest,_about_1863.jpg
Except for one painting (Woodgatherers at the edge of the forest, c. 1863), there are few paintings here with signs of work, industry (as in those from the 1870s in Argenteuil or those celebrating the steam engines in Gare St-Lazare), city bustle or even, for that matter, ones with harsher colour clashes, which feature in, say, individual members of the popular series.
The Cliffs at Etretat. 1885. Claude Monet (1840–1926). By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_The_Cliffs_at_Etretat.jpg
The paintings of adverse weather conditions or ones with a latent sense of danger, like those on the jagged shores of Étretat or the savage promontories at Belle-Île, are exuberant. You can feel the water and the wind.
Empathy with the Elements
There was an extraordinary empathy that Monet sought to cultivate with elemental nature and his struggle between subjective vision and objective observation. Specific works like the poplar series and those of Rouen cathedral, as has been argued by John House and Virginia Spate and others, have veiled political agendas.
Poplars in the Sun. 1887. By Claude Monet. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_041_(Poplars_in_the_Sun,_1887).jpg
Since the French Revolution with the poplar tree was a positively charged nationalist symbol, something that would have been as evident to the contemporary French viewer as an Australian painter today choosing to do a series of barbecues.
On the other hand, Monet's choice of Rouen cathedral polarized his contemporaries, who saw it either as unequivocal nationalism or as apostasy. The conservative critic Camille Mauclair opined that a national icon had been next to desecrated for not being shown the reverence it deserved, having been reduced to all but an arbitrary surface on which the artist recorded his obsessive <<(many unsympathetic commentators believed Monet and contemporaries like Cézanne to be deranged)>> perception of light effects. Such paintings take on a different face when seen alone.
The painting of Rouen cathedral in the exhibition is installed together with other examples of what are Monet’s most signal achievements, two of his haystacks, two also of the works of the Creuse valley, one of which leaps out an unforgettable crepuscular crispness, and one of the 1897 series of the mornings on the Seine.
Valley of the Creuse (Gray Day). 1889. By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_Valley_of_the_Creuse_(Gray_Day)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
While water was always a fascination for Monet, particularly in its seeming ability to raise light to an even higher register of movement and energy, the Mornings series marks the beginning of a concerted preoccupation with mirroring and reflection that climaxed with his waterlilies and the sweeping, engulfing, immersive Nymphéas that grace the Orangerie Museum in Paris.
Nympheas en fleur. Circa 1914-1917. By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_Nympheas_en_fleur.jpg
Suppose earlier paintings like his rooftop view of a street lined with tricolor flags celebrating the 14th of July, can be said to be ‘loud’ (and there was much such talk of synaesthesia values given to paintings in Monet's time). In that case, Monet's Mornings are among the most silent paintings he ever produced.
Die Rue Saint Denis - Fest des. 1878. By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monet_-_Die_Rue_Saint_Denis_-_Fest_des_30_Juni_1878.jpg
The trees and their reflection are allotted an equal amount of space on an almost square canvas so that in their symmetry, these paintings, except for perhaps a few feathery strokes, look like Rorschach blots.
Morning on the Seine. 1898. By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_Morning_on_the_Seine_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
There is nothing concrete in these paintings, yet despite the transient nature of everything in the scene – the trees, their reflection in the water – their stillness imbues the scene with an indomitability bordering on monumentality.
The Crystallisation of the Present into Something Lasting
It was this crystallization that of the present into something lasting, and the delicious confusion between thing and representation that endeared Monet to the novelist Marcel Proust who alluded to these paintings in two early discarded literary fragments: ‘At the point of infinity you can see the blue reflection of the trees, the blue reflection of the sky; see how everything utters not a word, as the water listens to the silence of the shore…’
A devotee of the elusive patterns of time, Proust, like Monet, devoted his artistic life to trying to make the fugitive moment permanent. To Proust, these paintings wrested something palpable from the impalpable. He considers them as representing peaceful places – in memory and mental invention as much as in reality – where colours, movements, sounds, and objects unify in an utterly soundless musical harmony.
Monet in London
Then there are the works that Monet did in London. Charing Cross Bridge (overcast day), 1900 is a work in which the artist revels in the dismal fog; It is also an example of the final phase of his life when air, water, and form begin to dissolve into one substance.
Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames. 1903. Claude Monet. Via Google Arts & Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/charing-cross-bridge-the-thames-claude-monet/pAEEvlo_73chNw
While we today may see this as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things, with works such as these, it is easy to see how the following generation of Cubists, led on by Cézanne, was searching for empirical meaning in solidity and structure as opposed to the increasingly diaphanous shroud that Monet threw over things.
Waterloo Bridge.1903. By Claude Monet. Via Claude-monet.com. https://www.claude-monet.com/waterloo-bridge.jsp
Most radical is Waterloo Bridge (1899-1901), where the bridge is nowhere to be seen. The mist-obscured sun and the scrubby immediacy of the paint in many ways reprise the signal work from almost twenty years before, An Impression: Sunrise (1872), except that there are no details at all. All worldly things seem to have melted into the mass of paint laid on with what appears to be a frenzy.
By this stage, the artist, well and indeed an established figure, no longer had to concern himself with niceties and could be as free as he liked. In this work, we are not the witness to an impression so much as a sensory explosion, held in check by the confines of the canvas itself.
New Approach to Landscape Painting
The break with traditions of landscape painting founded in the sixteenth century by Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, and the legacy of one-point perspective since the fifteenth century, came with the wave of Japonisme whose influence was as much in mores, fashion, and the decorative arts.
While also a result of the harsh cropping of the shorter exposure photographs after the 1880s, it was the flatter, layered space of the Japanese woodblock prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that gave the Impressionists license to reorder space and impetus to liberate themselves from the rigid threefold structure of fore-mid-and-background.
When such structuring is still evident in Monet's pictures, it usually occurs as two or three bands or strips – sky, land, and sea – rather than in terms of a tapering recession. Monet had made his peace with radicalism at the later stages of his life, but it works like the Flower Beds at Vétheuil (1881). The composition is far more provocatively a decisive break with tradition and intended to be seen. Here the flowers, a rounded, globulous accumulation of green and vermilion, comprise a good half of the surface and are pushed up against the picture plane.
Flower Beds at Vétheuil. 1881. By Claude Monet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_Flower_Beds_at_V%C3%A9theuil_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Impressionist Precursors: the Realists
Like all his Impressionist contemporaries, Monet's roots were in Realism, most predominately with Courbet and Millet.
Although Courbet was a loner, fierce politicist, and self-promoter, he was associated with the artists that congregated around the village of Barbizon near the Fontainebleau forest, which served as a kind of artist’s colony and voluntary exile away from the depredations of city life.
Along with others such as Theodore Rousseau and Camille Corot, the repudiation of urban dirt and bustle was not only nostalgic but had the very conscious social agenda of refocusing on the virtues of peasant life. Rural France had suffered considerably since the 1871 French humiliation at the hands of the Prussians, which was followed by a depression and mass exodus from the country into cities, mainly Paris, ill-equipped to take them, leading to still further urban turmoil.
Washerwomen. Circa 1855. By Jean-François Millet. Via Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet_-_Washerwomen_-_06.2422_-_Museum_of_Fine_Arts.jpg
Millet is very much an artist of the plight of the every day, many of his works becoming engraved into the popular consciousness of his day, thanks to the growing industry of reproduction. In the Washerwomen (c. 1855), two figures with the rounded stockiness for which Millet is remembered gather the washing on the bank of a lake at dusk. As so often with such figures by Millet, their legs seem to disappear into the earth.
Priory at Vauville, Normandy. Circa 1872–74. By Jean-François Millet. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Millet.Priory_at_Vauville.jpg
A later work, Priory at Vauville, Normandy (1872-4), is a larger canvas remarkable for its sparseness and beautiful for its lack of conventional beauties. An optimal example of the artist's striving for frankness, most of the earth here is dirt and rubble. No effort has been made to make the scene more palatable.
Twilight. Circa 1845 to 1860. By Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corot_-_Twilight,_1845%E2%80%9360.jpg
By contrast, Corot painted dreamy idylls, giving a good indication of the classicism that crept into the artist’s airy naturalism. In Twilight (1845-60), the two figures still picking fruit are as comfortable within the setting as mythological forest dwellers, and in Morning at Beauvais (c.1855-65), the debt to Claude is unmistakable: two sitting figures sit left of centre within a firmly demarcated foreground sheltered by trees that provide the threshold for what lies beyond.
A work by Troyon (Field outside Paris, 1845-51) of a meadow reveals how early artists had begun to take the principle of pleinairisme seriously.
Monet’s Contemporaries
Monet’s contemporaries include historical celebrities such as Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Degas.
Basket of Fruit. Circa 1864. By Édouard Manet. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edouard_Manet_-_Basket_of_Fruit_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Monet painted very few still-lives, but Manet was a master at them. His basket of fruit (c.1864) is a startling painting on all counts, in a compositional bareness and in the typical vivacity of its paint, which, like so many works by Manet, can still look wet.
Degas’s Racehorses at Longchamp (1871) is a work that reveals everything about the artist’s love of movement. You feel swept along with the sounds, the thudding of the horses’ hooves, and the expectation of the jockeys, preparing to face it out on the track.
Race Horses at Longchamp. 1871-1874. By Edgar Degas. Via Wikiart. https://www.wikiart.org/en/edgar-degas/race-horses-at-longchamp-1874
This period of French painting has, in some way, or another, became part of almost every middle-class person’s life and is the era that the least knowledgeable about art most easily turn to. For those who don't much care about the implicit content of some pictures, the social context, the political leanings of specific individuals, their allegiances, and personal tribulations, there is still plenty to enjoy. This is indeed the point of Impressionism and what certifies its enduring popularity. These works rarely quibble. The work of Monet and his contemporaries announce themselves to us with jubilant energy.
