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Claude Monet: Le Havre
built 633 days ago
In 1866 Monet had a child with Camille Doncieux, who had been his model. They married in 1870. In 1870 he moved to England to escape the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1871 he moved to Argenteuil near Paris where he painted some of his most famous pictures. In 1873 he painted Impression, Sunrise, showing the sea at Le Havre. When this picture was shown in 1874 one critic took its title and called the group of artists "Impressionists". He intended to make fun of the artists, but the name has stuck and this is what people today call this style of painting.
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On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet ... undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.[4]
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Monet was born in Paris on Nov. 14, 1840. In 1845 his family moved to Le Havre, and by the time he was 15 Monet had developed a local reputation as a caricaturist. Through an exhibition of his caricatures in 1858 Monet met Eugène Boudin, a landscape painter who exerted a profound influence on the young artist. Boudin introduced Monet to outdoor painting, an activity which he entered reluctantly but which soon became the basis for his life's work.
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The watery surface, like the atmospheric enveloppe Monet sought around the cathedrals and other series subjects, unified his canvases. The sky has already disappeared from this painting; the lush foliage rises all the way to the horizon and space is flattened by the decorative arch of the bridge. Monet gave equal emphasis to the physical qualitites of his painting materials and to the landscape motif he depicted. The materiality of the painted surface is particularly integral to the cathedrals and somewhat less so here. In later lilypond paintings, even more of the setting will evaporate, and the water’s surface alone will occupy the entire canvas. Floating lily pads and mirrored reflections assume equal stature, blurring distinctions between solid objects and transitory effects of light.
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Contrary to many others audacious impressionist projects, Monet's Cathedrals series enjoyed immediate acceptance among critics and collectors. " Monet causes that even the stones come to life ", declared the writer Georges Clemenceau. In May 1895 Monet selected 20 canvases to be exhibited in the gallery of his friend and Art dealer Durand-Ruel. In spite of the elevated price of each one of the views - between 12.000 and 15.000 francs- the sale was a huge success. And more than a century later, the success has not left Monet: in May 2000, Sotheby's auctioned one of these Cathedral canvases ( Le portail, soleil ) for more than $24 million.
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Modernist, too, are the "serial" paintings to which Monet devoted considerable energy during the 1890s. The most celebrated of these series are the haystacks (1891) and the facades of Rouen Cathedral (1892-1894). In these works Monet painted his subjects from more or less the same physical position, allowing only the natural light and atmospheric conditions to vary from picture to picture. That is, he "fixed" the subject matter, treating it like an experimental constant against which changing effects could be measured and recorded. This technique reflects the persistence and devotion with which Monet pursued his study of the visible world. At the same time, the serial works effectively neutralized subject matter per se, implying that paintings could exist without it. In this way his art established an important precedent for the development of abstract painting.
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