The Painter Who Attempted Suicide at 28 but Eventually Became the Father of Impressionism
How Did Claude Monet Make a Change in the World
Water lilies, Japanese bridges, beautiful gardens, poppy-splashed meadows, summer afternoons at the Seine, the nature lover, and IMPRESSIONISM, are the things Claude Monet is associated with, most of the time. But we often do not look at the struggles behind the extraordinary painter. Yes, as the heading says, he attempted suicide at 28, jumped into the Seine, and survived. The poverty, rejection, and depression made his life, traumatic. Despite suffering from depression in his late twenties, his love for gardening and painting paved a way for his remarkable achievement. Let us take a peek at the highlighted events and parts of his exceptional life that not only contributed to his grand success as a painter but also made a big change in the world.
The term ‘’Impressionism’’ and Monet
Impressionism is an art movement that developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily started in painting and later in music and it has chiefly evolved in France. Concentrating only on paintings, Impressionism consists of works produced between 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. Adding to that, it was a pivotal style in the development of modern art. The movement was characterized by depicting an open composition, focusing on an accurate illustration of light in its changing qualities, choosing an ordinary subject matter, using relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, painting unusual visual angles, and many more. The groups of artists chiefly consisted of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Edgar, and Degas. Common things between them were they rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing treatments of academic painting. These artists abandoned the traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns, and grays and instead painted in a lighter and sunnier tone. They tried to reproduce the animated effects of sunlight, shadow, and the reflected light that they observed. Monet once said ‘’Impressionism is only a direct sensation. All great painters were more or less Impressionists. It is a question of instincts.’’
Coming to Monet, he indirectly coined the term ‘Impressionism’ through his most famous painting, ‘’Impressionism: Sunrise’’(1872).
The group organized an exhibition in 1874 that included using innovative artwork of vivid and bright colors as well as spontaneous brushwork. This event helped in coining the term, Impressionism, as an art movement. Monet tasted his first success at the age of 15, with the sale of caricatures that were carefully observed and well-drawn. The idea of painting in the open air was introduced to him by his friend, Eugène Boudin, and had set a direction for Monet. Since then, he had focused on the visible phenomena and concentrated on light mostly. This fascination with light had sparked a revolution in painting, ladies, and gentlemen. Monet was not a trained artist to be very honest but his unique study of the changing effects of light at various hours of the same day of the same landscape was something very new. Monet’s art seeks to capture what the eye sees and the dynamic change of landscape depending on perspective and light. This commitment to Impressionism originally began as a way to free himself from the rigid constraints of the Salon de Paris, but eventually survived as a signature style that characterized his lifelong body of work.
According to William Seitz, he said that Monet belongs to the tradition of Renaissance illusionism, he simply based his art on perceptual rather than conceptual knowledge. Monet loved to paint the same subject, repeatedly and they are segregated into series. As he said here, ‘’To paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place’’ this is from a letter written by Monet to Alice Hoschede, his second wife, in 1886. Water lilies, Rouen Cathedral, Haystacks, Poplars, Venice, Houses of Parliament are some of them. Even though they are of the same subject, they never look the same. Painting under different circumstances was one of his specializations.
His Beloved Garden Was Everything
Claude Monet said ‘’Beyond painting and gardening, I am good for nothing.’’ A ‘did you know?’ thing for the readers, well, you might know if you are a staunch admirer of him, but Monet’s garden at Giverny, is (yes, it still exists in a perfect shape) like a dream garden for many and he turned it into a beautiful serene place for him to paint. Clos Normand and a Japanese-inspired water garden are the two parts of the iconic garden. The former consists of fruit trees or ornamental trees that dominate the climbing roses, the long-stemmed hollyhocks, and the colored banks of annuals. Monet mixed the simplest flowers (daisies and poppies) with the rarest varieties. He tried to make the Clos Normand full of perspectives, symmetries, and colors. The Japanese- inspired water garden’s central attraction is the Japanese bridge, well you might have seen it in many of his paintings too. Monet imported water lilies from Egypt and South America and for the last 25 years of his life, he painted those water lilies and created an emblematic series of them. A little aesthetic environment would hover around us, while we read this line written by Monet, ‘’I want to paint the air around the bridge, the house, the boat. The beauty of the air where they are, and it is nothing other than impossible.’’
Monet himself said that gardening is a profession that he learned during his youth when he was unhappy and it was maybe the two flowers that he owes becoming a painter. It took a while for him to understand his water lilies and he cultivated them with no prior thought of painting them. Monet believed that the essential subject is the mirror of the water whose aspect changes and also thanked the expanses of the sky reflected in it, spreading life and movement. These lines explain how Monet was dependent on and at the same time loved his enigmatic garden. In fact, Monet spent his final years, in Giverny, mostly painting water lilies and taking care of his dearest garden. Also, the way he took care of his garden was commendable, one of his letters to Alice, when he used to travel quite often, said, ‘’And the garden? Are there still flowers? I really hope there will still be Chrysanthemums when I come back. If there is a risk of frost, make nice bouquets.’’ Well, you can take a stroll in the garden too, it is open to visitors.
The Monet Style
What is the Monet style, anyway? Apart from the vibrant colors, painting the same subject under different circumstances, creating magic with light and shadows, depicting the landscape and leisure activities in the Seine, and many more. But beyond that, there are a few things we need to know about his style and techniques.
Monet found his subjects in his immediate surroundings like his first wife, Camille, and Alice's second wife. They mostly got featured in his paintings as models. Then he shifted from place to place, for example, after the Franco-Prussian War, he came back to France from London. His first stay was in Argenteuil, then west to Vétheuil, Poissy, and finally to the more rural Giverny in 1883. The landscapes charted his journeys around the north of France and are very evident in his paintings as well. Cliffs, churches, portraits, and banks of the rivers have been the most highlighted paintings, during this phase.
Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio. He had a quest to capture nature more accurately which has also prompted him to reject European conventions concerning composition, color, and perspective. Nature, en Plein Air, and Impressionism have always been the phrases that are used to describe Monet. Not forgetting the magic of light, Monet’s treasure it was! If we talk about a painting from his early years, ‘’Woman in a Green Dress’’ can be a beautiful example of how did he manage to play with light. According to Artble, the following observation has been made-
The low-lit dark tones of Green Dress and the natural summer sunlight of the Garden are a perfect display of Monet’s early palette range. Here, Monet studies how light reacts upon touching various colors on his model, which is his first wife, Camille. The green of her dress is vibrantly portrayed and the minute amount of her skin on display radiates color against the low-lit room.
Shifting to the general pattern of Monet’s paintings, Laura Auricchio, said
Monet’s asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two-dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling, as he inspired by the Japanese woodblock prints. Monet brought a vibrant tone to his paintings, unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows.
His palette was limited, banishing browns and earth colors and, by 1886, black had also disappeared. On asking what colors he uses in his paintings, Monet said that the point is to know how to use the colors, and it is a habit. But later he replied that he use flake white, cadmium yellow, vermilion, deep madder, cobalt blue, emerald green, and nothing else. Although his palette changed after his eye surgery in 1923, we will read about it in the next section. The artist had a love of depicting color in new and experimental ways and this was heavily influenced by the different ways objects would look depending on the time of day. Another interesting observation has been made: Monet and all the Impressionists used the technique of ‘’broken color’’. It is characterized by a flurry of small strokes of broken color and it is used to achieve the actual sensation of light itself in a painting. Given below is an example of the same.
Monet’s life was very inspiring, indeed. But, before the 1880s he did not get any recognition as such. He began to get attention and acceptance from the late 1880s, when he kind of moved away from the term, Impressionism and wanted to explore more and push his boundaries of art. Adding to that, the Impressionists at the same time began to dissolve. Paradoxically, as his style matured and as he continued to develop the sensitivity of his vision, the strictly illusionistic aspect of his paintings began to disappear. Plastic form dissolved into colored pigment, and three-dimensional space evaporated into a charged, purely optical surface atmosphere. Monet refined his palette in the 1870s, consciously minimizing the use of darker tones and favoring pastel colors. This coincided with his softer approach, using smaller and more varied brush strokes. His palette would again change in the 1880s, with more emphasis than before on harmony between warm and cold hues. From the 1880s onwards and particularly in the 1890s, Monet’s series of paintings of specific subjects sought to document the different conditions of light and weather, and a classic example is ‘’Haystacks’’.
Blue to Red and Again Back to Blue
Monet was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes in 1912, at the age of 72, and he underwent surgery in 1923. Nuclear cataracts have the effect of absorbing low wavelength blue light, desaturating colors, and making the vision look more reddish and yellow. He wrote in 1918 to a Paris eye doctor, ‘’I no longer painted light with the same accuracy. Red appeared muddy to me, pinks insipid and the intermediate and lower tones escaped me.’’ Monet’s paintings were blue-green mostly before 1914 but they changed eventually to red and yellow and a classic example is ‘’The House Seen From The Rose Garden’’(1922–24). Liebreich(1872) suggested that the artist would compensate for the dullness of blue by using excessive amounts of the color, or by painting with colors that still retained brilliance such as reds. Below, we can see that Monet used red and the painting has an overriding bluish tone.
As a result, in 1922, blues disappeared from his paintings in exchange for red and yellow, he simplified his compositions and sought subjects that could offer broad color and tone. Monet underwent cataract surgery only on his right eye and he refused to operate on his left eye. And as a result, it is believed that due to the removal of his lens, which filters out ultra-violet wavelengths, Monet began to perceive and paint a spectrum of color typically unseen by the human eye. He wrote in 1924 to his physician, ‘’I see blue and I no longer see red or yellow. This annoys me terribly because I know these colors exit. Its filthy. Its disgusting’’. After the surgery, Monet was able to see colors he had not seen for years, particularly violet and blue tones. Monet was not pleased with the blue paintings he created during this period, Dr. James Ravin said, who is an ophthalmologist with an undergraduate degree in art history. Monet wanted to destroy them but he eventually overcame the color difficulties by using glasses with tinted lenses and lived to finish a major series of paintings for the French government. It was a major change for Monet as well, not seeing any blue or violet for years and suddenly seeing everything bluish seemed to be very frustrating for him. It was like living in darkness for decades and then coming out in the light. This was the reason, he switched to red and yellow colors from his usual blue-green spectrum and after his surgery, he returned to his style a decade ago. A difference can be seen between the same painting of 1899 and 1922.
Claude Monet set an example to the world: how one can overcome all the hurdles and achieve something extraordinary. In fact, till the last year of his life, he continued painting despite going through his cataract problems. Those paintings were a little blurry but it was an essential bridge between Impressionism and Modern Art. In fact, Monet helped to change the world of painting by shaking off the conventions of the past. By dissolving forms in his works, Monet opened the door for further abstraction in art, and he is credited with influencing such later artists as Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. At the time of his funeral, in 1926, French statesman Georges Clémenceau declared, “No black for Monet!” as he saw the black shroud for Monet’s casket. Later, he exchanged that for a floral cloth. As we know, Monet did not use black color at all in his early and middle years, he combined darker colors to create a dynamic appearance of a shadow. This shows how Monet and his mighty brush revolutionized and made a change in the world. This article is just a celebration of his awe-inspiring paintings.
Ending with a beautiful quote said by Monet, ‘’ Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand as if it were necessary to understand when it is simply necessary to love.’’
References
- “Claude Monet’s Garden at Giverny.” n.d. Giverny.org. https://giverny.org/gardens/fcm/visitgb.htm
- “Major Characteristics of Art That Claude Monet Exemplifies in His Artwork | EHow.com.” 2019. EHow.com. 2019. https://www.ehow.com/info_8350997_major-monet-exemplifies-his-artwork.html
- The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. 2019. “Impressionism | Definition, History, Art, & Facts.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Monet
- The Art Story. 2012. “Impressionism Movement Overview.” The Art Story. 2012. https://www.theartstory.org/movement/impressionism/
5. “Monet’s Letters Paint a Picture of the Man behind the Masterpieces.” n.d. Art & Object. https://www.artandobject.com/articles/monets-letters-paint-picture-man-behind-masterpieces
6. Jones, Paul. 2020. “Monet’s Terrifying Light.” Www.artic.edu, October. https://www.artic.edu/articles/846/monets-terrifying-light
7. Auricchio, Laura. 2019. “Claude Monet (1840–1926).” Metmuseum.org. 2019. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cmon/hd_cmon.htm
8. Wikipedia Contributors. 2019. “Claude Monet.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. March 14, 2019.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet
9. Monet, Claude. 2018. “Learn the Classic Techniques of Claude Monet.” LiveAbout. 2018. https://www.liveabout.com/impressionist-masters-palettes-techniques-claude-monet-2578614
10. Artble. 2017. “Claude Monet Style and Technique.” Artble. July 19, 2017. https://www.artble.com/artists/claude_monet/more_information/style_and_technique
11. “Was Blue the Only Hue Monet Could See? : Poor Vision May Have Colored Art.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1985. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-04-mn-4337-story.html
12. Zoë Vanderweide. 2019. “21 Facts about Claude Monet.” Sothebys.com. Sotheby’s. February 5, 2019. https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/21-facts-about-claude-monet
13. Scott, Dan. 2019. “How to Paint like Claude Monet.” Draw Paint Academy. April 29, 2019. https://drawpaintacademy.com/paint-like-claude-monet/
