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24
UNIT XI MONET (1840-1926)
The use of the name Impressionism to characterise the new style came from the first exhibition
of members of the group at the recently vacated former studio of photographer Nadar in 1874,
where they had often encountered the leaders of Parisian intellectual and cultural life. Claude Monet
exhibited among others an extraordinary painting entitled Impression - Sunrise, Le Havre, painted
two years earlier, described by Monet himself as "sun in the mist and few masts of boats sticking up
in the foreground." The title gave rise to the name applied to the entire movement. The exhibition
was greeted with public derision, the like of which had never been experienced in Paris. Every
tradition of European painting seemed to have been thrown aside. Not only form but substance
itself has vanished. The picture was a mere collection of coloured streaks and blobs on a light blue
ground. Today observers have no difficulty recognising a sailboat and a rowboat in the foreground,
masts and equipment, haze, and smoke, all reflected in the rippled surface of the water. This
revolutionary painting intended to correspond to the image the eye sees in an instantaneous glimpse
of the port of Le Havre at sunrise, summed up the beliefs of the school. In retrospect, the name
Impressionism seems one of the few appropriate names in the history of art.
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Monet was born in Paris, his father was a grocer, and the family soon moved to Le Havre on
the coast of Normandy, where his father became a ship chandler, and the boy could constantly
observe ships and the sea. This was very important for his later preoccupation with light, water, and
human experience in relation to the unending stream of time. He started as a caricaturist. In 1858 he
was introduced to landscape painting.
In 1867 Monet submitted to the Salon a revolutionary work. the huge Women in the Garden.
The entire picture, more than eight feet high, was painted outdoors and required him to devise new
methods in order to record the immediate impression of light on the dresses, the flowers, and the
trees. The feeling of sunlight is warm and rich, but the colours are still local, though soft blue and
lavender shadow does reflect into the faces of the women and their flowing dresses. The leaves are
coloured in varying shades of green. In this and other pictures Monet established the new
Impressionist subject - the moment of experience in light.
However successful from an artistic and historical point of view, the painting was a worldly
failure. Manet made fun at it. But a few years later when he had come to understand Monet's style
and adopted his brilliant colouring, Manet bought this picture for himself.
During the disorder of 1870-71 Monet fled, first to London, where he studied the art of
Constable and Turner, then to Holland and Belgium, where he was interested chiefly in landscape.
On his return to France Monet's style changed radically: he dissolved the object. In Impression -
Sunrise, Le Havre, he demonstrated that colour belongs not to the object but to the moment of the
visual experience. This was hard for his contemporaries to accept.
In 1873 Monet set up a floating studio in a boat on the Seine. The world passing before his
eyes formed a continuous stream of experience, from which he singled out moments, recorded in
series.
At the financially disastrous third Impressionist exhibition of 1877 Monet showed eight
canvases devoted to the railway. In the Gare Saint - Lazare in Paris, of 1877, Monet depicted a
locomotive drawing cars into a station. The iron-and-glass train shed offered to him a tissue of
changing light and colour, dominated by blue and silver, but touched on the ground with tan, green,
rose and gold. The Impressionists eliminated black from their palette and the shadows and the
massive black locomotive were painted in blue. The people in Monet's picture are spots of blue; the
puffs of steam are bubbles of blue and pearl. The locomotive's bumper is red, and this is the only
bright colour in the picture. The fleeting effects that absorbed Monet's attention could not pause
long enough for him to paint them. A picture like this was the product of several sessions.
By 1880 Monet's paintings were beginning to sell and he threw himself into the work with a
passion as if nature were at once a friend and an enemy. He painted on a beach during a storm to
ascertain the height and power of wind-driven waves, one of which swept him under (he was
rescued by fishermen).