Claude Monet

Le Havre

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840. When he was five the family moved to Le Havre, on the Normandy coast, where his father ran a grocery and ship-chandlery business.

He was a bad student and a good caricaturist. By fifteen he was selling charcoal caricatures of local people in a shop window for money.

The painter Eugène Boudin saw the caricatures in the shop window, sought him out, and took him outdoors to paint. Monet resisted at first and then, in his own account, understood suddenly what painting could be. Boudin's lesson was to work outside, in front of the subject, in the changing light — which became the method Monet used for sixty years.

Paris and the group

Monet went to Paris in 1859 and refused the conventional training. Instead of the École des Beaux-Arts he enrolled at the Académie Suisse and later the studio of Charles Gleyre, where in 1862 he met Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille.

Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille went to the forest of Fontainebleau to paint outdoors together. They were interested in ordinary modern subjects — a picnic, a river, a railway station — painted in bright colour, and in finishing pictures in front of the thing rather than working them up in a studio.

He was conscripted to Algeria in 1861, came back ill within a year, and his aunt paid to buy him out of the remaining service on condition he study art properly.

Camille

In 1865 Monet met Camille Doncieux, who modelled for him and became his companion.[1] Their son Jean was born in 1867.

Monet's family disapproved and cut off his allowance, and the couple spent years in real poverty. He wrote begging letters to friends and moved from village to village to escape landlords. At one low point in 1868 he wrote to a friend that he had tried to drown himself, though he treated it afterwards as a moment of despair rather than a settled intention.

They married in 1870. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out that year, Monet went to London to avoid conscription, and there he saw Turner's paintings and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought his work for the next forty years.

Impression, Sunrise

In April 1874 Monet and about thirty other painters, refused or ignored by the official Salon, held their own exhibition in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des Capucines. They constituted themselves formally as the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs.

Monet showed a small canvas of the harbour at Le Havre at dawn, orange sun over blue-grey water and masts, painted quickly and loosely. Asked for a title for the catalogue, he said to call it Impression.

The critic Louis Leroy wrote a mocking review built around that word, saying that wallpaper in its early stages was more finished than this seascape, and headlined it "Exhibition of the Impressionists". The painters took the name. The group held eight exhibitions in all, between 1874 and 1886.

The painting is at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

What Impressionism actually changed

The Impressionists painted outdoors, finished pictures on the spot, and used bright unmixed colours laid side by side rather than blended, so that the eye does the mixing. They painted shadows in colour instead of in brown or black.

The subjects changed too. Instead of history, myth and religion, they painted railway stations, boulevards, boating parties, suburbs, and weather. Ready-made paint in metal tubes, available from the 1840s, is part of the reason they could: it made carrying a full palette outdoors practical.

Critics objected that the pictures looked unfinished. By the standards of the Salon they were, and the painters meant them to be.

The series

From about 1890 Monet worked in series: the same subject painted many times under different light. He would work on several canvases in a single day, changing to the next as the light moved.

He painted about twenty-five grainstacks in 1890 and 1891, standing in a field near his house through autumn, winter and spring. He painted the west front of Rouen Cathedral more than thirty times in 1892 and 1893, from a room hired opposite. He painted poplars, the Thames at Waterloo Bridge, and the Doge's Palace in Venice.

The series show it plainly. The grainstack does not change; the painting changes completely. What he was painting was never the object.

Giverny

In 1883 Monet moved to Giverny, a village on the Seine about forty-five miles from Paris. He rented the house at first and bought it in 1890, when his paintings had finally made him money.

Camille had died of cancer in 1879, aged thirty-two. Monet painted her on her deathbed and wrote afterwards, appalled at himself, that he had caught himself studying the colours death was putting on her face. Ernest Hoschedé, a patron who had gone bankrupt, died in 1891, and Monet married his widow Alice in 1892. Her six children joined his two.

At Giverny he made the garden that became his last subject. There was a flower garden in front of the house, and from 1893 a water garden fed by a diverted stream, with a Japanese bridge and imported water lilies.

The Water Lilies

From about 1897 until his death Monet painted the water garden. In the late works the horizon disappears entirely: there is no bank, no sky except as reflection, only the surface of the water with lilies on it and clouds and willows in it.

He had wanted a room of them for years. In 1909 he told the critic Gustave Geffroy that he wanted the water-lily theme carried along the walls. In June 1914 he wrote that he was embarking on a great project, and in 1916 he had a third studio built at Giverny, lit by roof windows, big enough to hold canvases two metres high and four wide.

Clemenceau

The project reached the French state through Georges Clemenceau, who was prime minister for the last two years of the war. The two men had met in 1860, lost touch, and found each other again after 1908, when Clemenceau bought a property near Giverny.

On 12 November 1918, the day after the Armistice, Monet wrote to him. He was on the verge of finishing two decorative panels, he said, which he wanted to sign on Victory Day, and he was offering them to the State with Clemenceau acting as intermediary.

The gift kept growing. Two panels became twelve in the agreement of 1920, and nineteen in the contract signed on 12 April 1922. Monet reworked them continually, destroyed some outright, and asked to keep them until his death.

The cataracts

Monet's sight failed while he was working on the panels. He had cataracts in both eyes, and by 1914 his colour vision was badly affected, so that canvases from those years went red and muddy.

In 1922 the ophthalmologist Charles Coutela recorded that the right eye perceived only light. Clemenceau pressed him through two operations in early 1923, after years of refusal. Afterwards Monet complained that he saw everything with a bluish tint, and he destroyed canvases painted during the cataract years.

The Orangerie

The installation was worked out with the architect Camille Lefèvre and with Clemenceau's backing. Two oval rooms were built inside the Musée de l'Orangerie, in the Tuileries gardens, so that the panels run continuously round the walls with no corners.

There are eight compositions, assembled from panels, all 1.97 metres high. The sunrise tones hang to the east and the sunset tones to the west, so that the light of the day runs round the rooms.

They opened to the public in May 1927, six months after Monet's death. A floor below them hangs the collection assembled by the dealer Paul Guillaume.

Death

Monet died of lung cancer at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged eighty-six, with Clemenceau at his bedside. There was no religious ceremony, at his own request, and about fifty people attended.

Georges Clemenceau, the former prime minister, who had been his friend for decades and had pushed the Orangerie project through the French state, pulled the black cloth off the coffin at the graveside, saying that Monet should not have black.

Why Claude Monet matters

Monet made a way of painting that treated light and the passage of time as the actual subject, and he pursued it for sixty years with more discipline than anyone else in the group. The series paintings show a picture as the record of one moment of seeing rather than a description of an object.

The late Water Lilies had an effect he did not intend. Painted almost blind, with the horizon gone and the surface dissolved, they were taken up in the 1950s as an ancestor of American abstract painting. The painter André Masson called the Orangerie rooms the Sixtine Chapel of Impressionism in 1952, and in 1955 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought and hung one of the great late canvases. Critics drew the line from them to Pollock, Rothko, Newman and Still, and Monet's reputation, which had faded badly, was rebuilt on it.

The Musée Marmottan Monet holds Impression, Sunrise and the largest group of his work. The Musée d'Orsay holds the broad Impressionist survey, and the Orangerie holds the Water Lilies rooms.

Visiting Giverny

Monet's house and gardens at Giverny, west of Paris, are kept as a museum and open to visitors seasonally, in the months when the water garden he painted is in flower.