CLAUDE MONET - FRENCH ICON

The French are a highly civilised nation and have tried to maintain standards in literature and art through their various academies and institutes. Inevitably their rules and guidance are sometimes defied by groups dedicated to a new vision and to new techniques. These rebels may come to terms with the cultural establishment but, more likely, public taste eventually moves in their direction. Just such a rebel was Claude Monet (1840-1926) one of the founders of Impressionism, rejected in the 1870s, but latterly considered the finest painter in France and he died the pride of his country.

A young Monet by Renoir (1875)

Monet in his 1880s prime

 

Born in Paris, the son of a well-to-do grocer and his artistic wife, Monet’s family moved to Le Havre in Normandy in his childhood. His mother died when he was 12 and he was cared for by a widowed aunt.  Claude showed an early talent for drawing and decided, to his father’s acute disappointment, that he would study art instead of entering commerce. He duly enrolled in 1859 in the Académie Suisse in Paris where he meets Pissarro. After a short period of military service in Algeria, Monet was invalided out and from 1862 was working under Glyre and Eugène Boudin (who became his mentor) and with young artists like Bazille, Sisley and Renoir.

French conventional salon painting was still in thrall to the Romantic tradition of Delacroix and the Neo-Classicism of Ingres with historical, mythological and Oriental subjects being particularly valued. Monet and his circle were deeply interested in the composition of colour, the contrasts of light and the joys of landscape painting en plein air. They admired the realist Courbet but they were keen to experiment much further. Accordingly, Monet and his circle produced works using short brush-strokes, eschewing excessive detail and displaying bright colours without smooth finish, creating atmosphere and light effects.

These works were submitted to the annual Salon hangings sponsored by the Académie des Beaux Arts, but they were increasingly rejected by this prestigious but conservative institution. In despair the young artists organised their own Paris exhibition and in 1873 the first of 8 annual exhibitions opened in a studio on the Rue des Ecoles. An early Monet work caused a critic to coin the term “Impressionism” an uncomplimentary dig at the allegedly unfinished nature of the painting – but the term stuck.

Women in the Garden (1867)

Women with a Parasol (1873)

 

Monet's seminal painting - Impression, Rising Sun (1873)

The Impressionist circle had fluctuating membership as one rule was that they did not exhibit at the Salon, which still enjoyed high prestige. Influential Edouard Manet, rather older than the others, never joined, Bazille had died in action in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but Monet principally carried the torch (though he too exhibited for 2 years at the Salon). He was joined fitfully by, in retrospect, the illustrious Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and the leading woman, Berthe Morisot. The style became immensely influential in art, music and even literature.

Monet began to prosper in the 1880s as dealers became interested in his work. In an 1870 stay in London he came to admire Constable and, above all, Turner and he produced canvasses of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament. He wanted later to assert his modernity and not be typecast as a landscape painter and we see bustling city scenes and railway stations.

Houses of Parliamenr, London

Gare St-Lazare, Paris

Monet was an enormously prolific painter and by the 1890s rich collectors were flocking to buy his works. He would reproduce the same subject from different angles or at different times of the day. Thus, there is a series of studies of Rouen Cathedral and of simple Haystacks, among others.

Rouen Cathedral

 

End of the Summer

Monet’s personal life was complicated. He had married his beautiful and romantic model Camille Doncieux in 1870 and they had 2 children, but she died of cancer in 1879. Monet then took up with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store director, art lover and a patron of the impressionists since 1873. Alice had 6 children with Ernest but in 1878 disaster struck when Ernest was forced into bankruptcy. Monet helped out and the Hoschedé family and the Monets lived together harmoniously in various lodgings near Paris or in Normandy. Ruined Ernest took a job on a newspaper in Paris and became more detached from Alice, who nevertheless observed the proprieties, never acknowledging she was Monet’s mistress.

Ernest died in 1891 and Monet and Alice quietly married in 1892. Later, Monet’s eldest son Jean married Alice’s second daughter Blanche, who became an artist, was widowed in 1914 and tended Monet in his old age. Alice’s third daughter Suzanne married the American artist Theodore Butler in 1892, but when Suzanne died in 1899, Butler married Alice’s first daughter Marthe. This peculiar extended family lived together at Monet’s new house at Giverny, Normandy, bought in 1890, with Monet a reluctant, grumpy but loving paterfamilias of this ménage with Alice running the house efficiently aided by a growing army of servants a and gardeners.

Monet at his garden and house and Giverny

Monet loved his two gardens at Giverny – the front Clos Normand densely planted with every possible flourishing bloom displaying vibrant colours and the second water garden, famous for its water lilies and delectable bridges. His life was agreeable; he became an expert on plants and gardening, he adorned the house with his collection of paintings honouring old friends and he built up an enviable selection of Japanese prints, moved by their restrained delicacy. He still loved to travel and he treated himself to a splendid Panhard motor car, making long journeys through France.

He cultivated his friendships, especially with Georges Clemenceau (Le Tigre) whom he had met as a poor medical student in 1860s Paris. Politics did not attract Monet (he never voted) but the basis of their friendship was recollection of earlier times, a shared love of art and an enthusiasm for Japanese prints. Clemenceau also was developing a garden in Brittany and he came to rely on Monet for help and guidance. Party politics apart Clemenceau and Monet were united in their general radicalism, their atheism, their feelings for justice in the age of Dreyfus, and their love for the soil of France.

The years were crowding in; Alice died of leukaemia in 1911, a devastating blow which almost made Monet retire from painting. His sharp eyesight was endangered by the onset of cataracts, which were temporarily patched up. With the encouragement of friends Monet returned to painting and embarked in 1914 on his famous series of  250 studies of “Water-lilies”, which he had first painted in the 1890s. The Great War raged all about him but he was able to concentrate on his painting.

Water Lilies

Water Lilies again

 

Clemenceau and Monet

    

In 1918, almost the first act of Clemenceau after the Armistice was to visit Monet and secure the gift of the Water Lilies series for the French nation. An extension to L’Orangerie gallery was commissioned to receive the paintings, which emphasised the beauty of Nature and perhaps the fleetingness of Life – but there are endless abstractions possible. Monet at last died in 1926, appropriately in the arms of his friend Clemenceau. He had lived a full, vivid life and had lit up his world with his genius.

When the Water Lilies were unveiled, Clemenceau was dismayed by their mixed critical reception. Only in the 1950s were the paintings “rediscovered” and their iconic status established. All art goes through phases of favour and obscurity but ultimately true quality shines through.

SMD

26.06.18

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2018