Lady in the Garden - Monet
(1840-1926), French impressionist painter, who
brought the study of the transient effects of
natural light to its most refined expression.
Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris,
but he spent most of his childhood in Le Havre.
There, in his teens, he studied drawing; he also
painted seascapes outside with the French
painter Eugene Louis Boudin. By 1859 Monet had
committed himself to a career as an artist and
began to spend as much time in Paris as
possible. During the 1860s he was associated
with the preimpressionist painter Edouard Manet,
and with other aspiring French painters destined
to form the impressionist school—Camille
Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred
Sisley.
Working outside, Monet painted simple landscapes
and scenes of contemporary middle-class society,
and he began to have some success at official
exhibitions. As his style developed, however,
Monet violated one traditional artistic
convention after another in the interest of
direct artistic expression. His experiments in
rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct,
sketchlike application of bright color became
more and more daring, and he seemed to cut
himself off from the possibility of a successful
career as a conventional painter supported by
the art establishment.
In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to
appeal directly to the public by organizing
their own exhibition. They called themselves
independents, but the press soon derisively
labeled them impressionists because their work
seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first
impression) and because one of Monet's paintings
had borne the title Impression: Sunrise (1872,
Mus嶪
Marmottan, Paris). Monet's compositions from
this time are extremely loosely structured, and
the color was applied in strong, distinct
strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had
been attempted. This technique was calculated to
suggest that the artist had indeed captured a
spontaneous impression of nature. During the
1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this
technique, and he made many trips to scenic
areas of France, especially the Mediterranean
and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant
effects of light and color possible.
By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as
the leader of the impressionist school, had
achieved significant recognition and financial
security. Despite the boldness of his color and
the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he
was recognized as a master of meticulous
observation, an artist who sacrificed neither
the true complexities of nature nor the
intensity of his own feelings. In 1890 he was
able to purchase some property in the village of
Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began
to construct a water garden (now open to the
public)—a lily pond arched with a Japanese
bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of
bamboo. Beginning in 1906, paintings of the pond
and the water lilies occupied him for the
remainder of his life; they hang in the
Orangerie, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago;
and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Throughout these years he also worked on his
other celebrated “series” paintings, groups of
works representing the same subject—haystacks,
poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the river Seine—seen
in varying light, at different times of the day
or seasons of the year. Despite failing
eyesight, Monet continued to paint almost up to
the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at
Giverny.
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