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Monet
Claude Monet 1840-1926 (86 years). At first Glance Monet's paintings seem rather superficial, a rendering of ephemeral effects of light under diverse weather conditions: sunlight on water, a breeze stirring the poplar trees, fogs in London, and morning, noon and evening light on Rouen Cathedral or haystacks.
Indeed, Monet has long been regarded, as Cezanne remarked of him, 'merely an eye, but what an eye', translating onto canvas the images before him. Cezanne was an intellectual painter, creating a theory which became the foundation of modern art; when he called Monet merely an eye he did not mean the mundane eye through which most of us see the world. Monet's eye was a painter's eye, an eye with a creative mind behind it, interpreting apparent reality and putting it into the context of the thoughts in the painter's mind, thus creating a new vision for the spectator.
Monet's approach to the visual world was along Venetian lines rather than Florentine; he interpreted the world through colour rather than drawing. His ancestors are Titian and Claude, not Michelangelo and Poussin. Like his predecessors, he discovered that colour has its own reasons just as drawing inhibits colour, and colour breaks the clear demands of line. Monet sought for the true reality behind an apparent reality of visual appearance by stretching colour to it's limits and looking for those significant nuances of colour which express the reality of the world in nature itself.
Claude Oscar Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840. His father was a grocer and wanted his son to follow a profession. Fate decreed otherwise. When Monet was five the family moved to Le Havre, a bustling seaport on the mouth of the River Seine near the spectacular white cliffs of Etretat and Fecamp. The young Monet was excited by the movement of shipping and the carious moods of the sea - they appealed to his own naturally volatile and emotional temperament.
In his late teens he met Eugene Boudin, a painter who kept an artist's colour shop at Honfleur. Boudin saw some of young Monet's drawings and encouraged him to paint and, what's more, to paint in the open air, a method not much in use at a time of studio painters.
Fired with the idea of becoming a painter Monet went to Paris where he first joined the Academie Suisse and the Gleyre studio. Both places were seedbeds for a new generation of painters and here Monet met Bazille, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and others, the last two of whom became lifelong friends.
In 1870 Monet married Camille Doncieux and they went to Trouville for their honeymoon. While there, Monet went on a trip to Le Havre and, for reasons that no one has been able to explain, but was probably concerned with a fear of being conscripted into the French army, left for England on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. His wife had to be rescued by Boudin and sent after him.
In London, where Pissarro had also fled, Monet painted his first London scenes. The war over, Monet and his wife returned to France in 1872and set up house near Paris, on the Seine at Argenteuil. Here, Monet began a fruitful period of painting and of discussions about art with his friends Renoir, Manet and Sisley. In 1878 he moved again to nearby Vetheuil. It was here that Monet became friendly with a rich businessman, Ernest Hoschede and his wife Alice, who became admirers of Monet's paintings. When Hoschede's business went under he disappeared, leaving his wife and children with the Monets.
The following year Monet's beloved wife Camille died of tuberculosis just months after the birth of their second son. Monet recorded her deathbed in an extraordinary picture. After her death, the restless Monet travelled extensively to the French and Italian Rivieras, to Normandy and the Atlantic coast of France. Wherever he went, he painted, but he was not content with his work. Different subjects were not the answer; all that mattered was the painting itself, the significance of reality through colour.
Monet eventually returned to the countryside near Paris, renting and then buying a house at Giverny where he set about creating a garden that he could paint in. In 1891, he began to paint his famous series of haystacks in the surrounding countryside, at all times of year and every kind of weather A year later he began his equally famous series of paintings of his beloved garden at Giverny.
Alice Hoschede had been sharing his life for many years: his letters to her about his painting excursions and his fears and hopes providing a wonderful insight into the artist's mind. When her husband died in 1892, Alice and Claude married.
Monet now entered a happy and productive part of his life. His work was accepted by the official Salon and he was not short of money. There were trips to Norway, Venice and London, but his home, both domestically and artistically, was at Gaverny.
Alice's death in 1911 left him lonely and bereft and he was having trouble with his sight. After a cataract operation and special glasses he was able to continue work and was encouraged by Georges 'Tiger' Clemenceau to complete the great water-lily series which was acquired by the French state. Although now acclaimed as a great French painter, Monet himself, like most artists, never felt that he had achieved the perfect conclusion of the ideas that were in his mind. He died on 6 December 1926.
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