Claude Monet. Nina Kalitina
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in the Garden, 1866–1867.
Oil on canvas, 255 × 208 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1866.
Oil on canvas, 248 × 217 cm.
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Monet was capable of showing considerable civic courage, but was occasionally guilty of faint-heartedness and inconsistency. Thus, in 1872, Monet, together with the painter Eugène Boudin, visited the idol of his youth, Gustave Courbet in prison – an event perhaps not greatly significant in itself, but given the general hounding to which the Communard Courbet was subject at that time due not only to his political leanings but for suggesting the disassembly of the Column Vendôme, Monet and Boudin’s act was both brave and noble. With regard to the memory of Edouard Manet, Monet was the only member of the circle around the former leader of the Batignolle group to take action upon hearing, in 1889, from the American artist John Singer Sargent that Manet’s masterpiece Olympia might be sold to the United States. It was Monet who called upon the French public to collect the money to buy the painting for the Musée du Louvre. Again, at the time of the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s Monet sided with Dreyfus’ supporters and expressed his admiration for the courage of Emile Zola. A more domestic episode testifies to the warmth of Monet’s nature: after becoming a widower, he remarried in the 1880s. Alice Hoschedé had five children from her first marriage. Monet received them all with open arms and invariably referred to them as “my children”.
There was, however, another side to Monet. In the late 1860s, suffering acutely from poverty and lack of recognition, Monet deserted his first wife Camille and their young son Jean on several occasions, virtually abandoning them. Giving in to fits of despair, he would rush off somewhere, anywhere, just to change his surroundings and escape from an environment in which he had suffered personal and professional failure. On one occasion he even resolved to take his own life. Similarly hard to justify is Monet’s behaviour towards the other Impressionists when, following Renoir’s example, he broke their “sacred union” and refused to take part in the group’s fifth, sixth and eighth exhibitions. Degas was not unjustified in accusing him of thoughtless self-advertising when he learned of Monet’s refusal to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1880. Finally, Monet’s hostile attitude to Paul Gauguin was quite indefensible. These examples make the contradictions of Monet’s character quite clear.
Woman in the Garden. Sainte-Adresse, 1867.
Oil on canvas, 82 × 100 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.
Oil on canvas, 98.1 × 129.9 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The reader might justifiably ask: why write about personal features in an essay on an artist, particularly when some of these show Monet in a not especially attractive light?
It is always dangerous to divide a single, integral personality into two halves – on the one hand, the ordinary man with all the complexities and upheavals of his individual lot; on the other, the brilliant painter who wrote his name in the history of world art. Great works of art are not created by ideal people, and if knowledge of their personality does not actually assist us in understanding their masterpieces, then at least it can explain a great deal about the circumstances in which the masterpieces were created. Monet’s abrupt changes of mood, his constant personal dissatisfaction, his spontaneous decisions, stormy emotion and cold methodicalness, his consciousness of himself as a personality moulded by the preoccupations of his age, set against his extreme individualism – taken together these features elucidate much in Monet’s creative processes and attitudes towards his own work
Early Life
Oscar Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, but all his impressions as a child and adolescent were linked with Le Havre, the town to which his family moved about 1845. The surroundings in which the boy grew up were not conducive to artistic studies: Monet’s father ran a grocery business and turned a deaf ear to his son’s desire to become an artist. Le Havre boasted no museum collections of significance, no exhibitions and no school of art. The gifted boy had to be content with the advice of his aunt, who painted merely for personal pleasure, and with the directions of his school-teacher.
Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. He copied them from newspapers and magazines – caricature playing a central role in France’s political life during the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to his caricatures, the young Monet drew portraits for which his neighbours paid him. From the outset what is striking about his caricatures is the maturity and proficiency of the drawing, as well as a degree of experience surprising in a young man of eighteen. It is true that at sixteen years old Monet was already taking drawing classes with professor François-Charles Ochard, a former student of the famed Jacques-Louis David. But the way his models are individualised, the accuracy of the drawing, and the clever simplification of the figures’ distinctive traits all testified to the artist’s brilliant individuality and to his talent, which went beyond the modest abilities of a copyist.
The Luncheon (decorative panel), 1868.
Oil on canvas, 160 × 201 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 100 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
During this period, he signed his drawings “Claude”. There was a frame shop next to his father’s store, and its display window became the site of Monet’s first “exhibitions.” A local painter by the name of Eugène Boudin also exhibited there. Boudin’s seascapes seemed baffling and repellent to Monet, as they did to many others. All the same, this odd painter took note of the drawings done by Monet, who was practically still a child at the time. One day, as Monet recalled it, Boudin told him that he always enjoyed looking at his caricatures, that they were funny, and that they had been drawn with intelligence and fluency. Boudin believed Monet’s talent was obvious even from the first glance, but that he should not let it rest there. In addition to the natural talent displayed in his cartoons, Monet still needed to learn to see, to paint, and to draw. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscape painting instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them – surrounded by air and light. For Boudin himself, painting meant landscapes alone. He felt a warm attachment and a great sense of responsibility for Monet’s education and progress as an artist. He explained to his young colleague that the Romantics had seen their day and that now one had to work in a different way. The charm of Boudin’s own canvases came from their spontaneity. When he endeavoured to complete a landscape successfully it lost that sincerity which, in his small studies, could make the viewer feel the cool gusts of the ocean breeze and the gentle rustling of shingles on the beach.
Monet said later that Boudin’s exhortations made no impact at first: he hardly paid attention to his words and always found an excuse not to go work with Boudin in the open air. He wasn’t yet able to digest Boudin’s strange, unusual work. Nevertheless, as Monet said himself, he liked this man. He had conviction, and he was sincere. During the summer Monet was relatively free and had run out of good excuses for declining Boudin’s offer to work alongside him. The latter, in spite of everything, set about to oversee Monet’s apprenticeship, and together they would paint studies along the seashore. “Eventually my eyes were opened,” admitted Monet, “and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time” (D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Paris, 1974, p. 13). Boudin’s own talent had developed in the same way, through direct contact with nature. He had previously been the owner of that same frame shop