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The Seine at Giverny, 1897. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 100.5 cm.
Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Haystacks at the End of Summer, Morning Effect, 1891.
Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 100.8 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Stacks of Wheat (Thaw, Sunset), 1890–1891.
Oil on canvas, 64.4 × 92.5 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Monet was lucky and immediately found a large country house where a studio could be set up. Around it stretched a big meadow where it was possible to create a garden. Monet rented this house without hesitation, and bought it soon after.
He lived there until the end of his life. One day he received a letter from Stephane Mallarmé, with the address as follows: “Monsier Monet, que l’hiver ni / L’été sa vision ne leurre / Habite, en peignant, Giverny/Si auprès de Vernon, dans l’Eure” (Mr Monet, whose vision neither winter or summer can deceive, lives and paints in Giverny, located next to Vernon, in the Evre).
The peasants did not accept the painter’s family right away: the city people seemed odd to them. But they were won over by Monet’s passion for work, which they witnessed continually. Every day, no matter what the weather, they saw the painter at his work in the fields. Monet felt at home right from the start. “I’m enraptured,” he wrote to the critic Duret. “Giverny is a splendid place for me.”
Wherever he went he never forgot Giverny. “I get into bed,” he wrote to Alice from Bordighera, “and for a blissful moment, my hands clasped, I think about Giverny and take a peek at my paintings hanging on the wall.”
They moved the floating studio, built in Argenteuil long before, to Giverny. “We used it mostly for diving off the cabin roof,” wrote Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, “and Monet was the leader. He was as good a diver as he was a swimmer, and he supervised our group swims, for the sake of caution.” He delighted in his time with his family.
Sometimes they sailed the boat to Rouen, or went mushroom hunting in the forest. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé remembers a tranquil scene on the riverbank, with Monet painting, Alice sewing, and the children given over to the joys of fishing. The children all loved Monet and were devoted to him.
Alice’s daughter Blanche, who married Claude’s older son Jean, stayed with Monet until the end of his life, taking care of the old painter after her mother’s death. “Monet had a violent, intense temperament, but he was kindness itself,” she recalled. “He loved children. I remember playing prisoners’ base with him on the Vétheuil road, at Roche-Guyon, and also playing hide-and-seek on the Isle de Bennecourt. But when he was working he couldn’t be disturbed for any reason whatever.” In Poppy Field (vol. 1, p. 154), for instance, the line of dark-green trees, interrupted by a building, runs parallel to the bottom edge of the canvas. Now, however, Monet was attracted by the expressiveness of strictly linear rhythms, and his treatment of form became increasingly a matter of planes.
Grainstack (Snow Effect), 1891.
Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 92.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Haystacks: Snow Effect, 1891.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
Monet’s landscapes of the 1880s reflect not only new searchings, but also contradictory stylistic tendencies. Some of these arose from attempt on his part to reach a certain compromise. In March 1880, he wrote to Théodore Duret that he was ‘grooming’ his painting in a desire to exhibit it in the Salon.
He also remarked on his decision to show his works at the international exhibitions of the art dealer Georges Petit. “I am doing this”, Monet explained, “not out of any personal inclination, and I am very sorry that the press and the public would not respond seriously to our small exhibitions, far superior as they were to the official marketplace.
But, well, you have to do what you have to do.” Still, it was less the search for a compromise that pushed Monet towards changes than an inner, as-yet-subconscious sense of the crisis of Impressionism. During the 1880s this feeling was experienced in one way or another by all the creators of the Impressionist method; Pissarro, for example, became closer to Seurat and Signac, and turned sharply towards Divisionism, whilst Renoir felt a new enthusiasm for Ingres and the Renaissance masters.
Unlike them, Monet turned towards no extraneous influence, experienced no impulse from without, but rather followed the logic of his own artistic development, which drove him to a continual intensification of his own experimentation.
This tendency had always been characteristic of Monet, but his perception of nature as a unity had remained constant, always maintaining a harmonious equilibrium as he represented her particular characteristics.
In the 1890s and 1900s, however, Monet’s experiments with light and colour frequently became almost an end in themselves and, as a result, his harmonious perception of Nature began to disappear. It is indicative that during this period he was already working in isolation.
Although this did not mean breaking off personal contacts with the friends of his youth, creative contact with them was lost. There were no more joint exhibitions, no exchanges of opinion, no arguments. In the 1890s, Pissarro moved away from Divisionism, and this marked a broad return to his old sphere of work, although his new pictures were no mere repetition of what he had produced before. Sisley, who had always remained rather in the shade, and who, in contrast to the other Impressionists, had not experienced any great creative turmoil, fell seriously ill and died in 1899.
Wheatstacks, 1891. Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 99.7 cm.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Haystacks (Midday), 1890. Oil on canvas, 65.6 × 100.6 cm.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, near Bennecourt, c. 1892–1893.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 100 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
In the mid-1880s, Renoir informed his correspondents that he was once again painting in his former soft and gentle manner and although, as with Pissarro, this was by no means a complete regression, Renoir’s art nonetheless regained its old verve, emotional power, and ingenuousness.
It was, however, the career of Claude Monet that demonstrated with truly classic clarity not only how Impressionism arose and flourished, but also how, when it lost the lyricism at its heart, it slowly died.
One of the central problems tackled by Monet at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century was that of serial work. The principle of work in series had been used by artists before Monet, especially in the field of graphic art, with cycles of several sheets devoted to a single event, hero, town, and so on.
Artists were particularly prolific with series depicting the seasons of the year, some of them relying on the language of conventional allegory, others depicting rural labour at different times of the year. Before Monet, however, no one in European art had created series devoted to a single motif such as haystacks, a row of poplars, or the façade of a cathedral.
Monet’s forerunners in this respect were Japanese artists, in particular Katsushika Hokusai, the creator of numerous series, including the celebrated Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Like all painters of his time, Monet was enthusiastic about the Japanese woodcuts which literally enchanted French art lovers during the latter half of the 19th century.
His enthusiasm was at first rather superficial, as evinced, for example, in La Japonaise (vol. 1, p.