Claude Monet. Volume 2. Nina Kalitina
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of showing Alice and the children the cliffs in the region of Caux, the flowering fields overlooking the sea, and the little fishing hamlets tucked into the recesses of the coast.
Earlier, in his youth, Boudin had brought him onto the cliffs near Dieppe, where he experienced the revelation of the Normandy landscape’s diversity. From the end of the 1860s onward, Monet explored the beauty of Étretat. Courbet had previously painted the arch the waters had sculpted into the coastal cliffs.
Waterloo Bridge in London, 1902. Oil on canvas,
65.7 × 100.5 cm. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
Charing Cross Bridge in London, c. 1902. Oil on canvas,
65.3 × 100. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
It seemed gigantic when used as a backdrop for the little boats gliding along the shore. But Monet found his own motifs there.
What most interested him were the atmospheric phenomena that alter nature’s colour. The reflections of the water shifted constantly, and alighted in coloured patches on the cliffs. The cliffs themselves seemed to go into motion, together with the sea and the clouds.
In Normandy, Blanche Hoschedé, Alice’s daughter, made her first attempts at painting. Monet’s example inspired his children. One day the writer Guy de Maupassant happened to see Claude Monet at work. This is how, in an unfinished tale, he described the painter on the cliffs of Étretat:
Last year, […] I often followed Claude Monet searching for impressions. He was no longer a painter, actually, he was a hunter. He would go along, followed by children who carried his canvasses – five or six canvasses representing the same subject at various times and with different effects.
He would take them up and put them aside one by one, according to the changes in the sky. The painter waited in front of his subject, keeping an eye on the sun and the shadows, then snatching, in a few brushstrokes, a descending ray of sunlight or a passing cloud and, disdainful of the false and the conventional, placing them rapidly on the canvas.
A few paintings of haystacks at Giverny suggested to Monet the idea of creating a whole series on this theme. He began in 1890 and by 1891 he was already able to show his Haystacks at Durand-Ruel’s – fifteen variations with a glowing or darkening sky, bright green or ashen-grey meadow, haystacks shot with red, yellow, or lilac, and the multi-coloured shadows they produced.
In critical works on Monet it is frequently suggested that in all his series the artist strove only for objective recording of optical impressions.
Monet did indeed set himself this task, but that did not prevent him from remaining an involved, creative artist, conveying his own emotional state to the viewer. Moreover, in his first series the lyrical impulse was still strongly in evidence. The politician and art critic Anatoly Lunacharsky remarked:
Claude Monet made countless pictures of a single object, for example, a haystack, painting it in the morning, at noon, in the evening, in the moonlight, in the rain, and so on.
One might expect these exercises – which link Monet with the Japanese – to produce something like a set of scientific colouristic statements about the celebrated haystack, but instead they prove to be miniature poems. The haystack is at times majestically proud, at times sentimentally pensive, or mournful…
Rouen Cathedral, 1892. Oil on canvas,
100 × 65 cm. Private collection, France.
Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894.
Oil on canvas, 99.7 × 65.7 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, 1894.
Oil on canvas, 100.1 × 65.8 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight: Harmony in Blue and Gold, 1893. Oil on canvas,
107 × 73.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
It is justifiable to ask whether in Haystacks and his other series of the 1890s Monet was deviating from Impressionism. The answer would seem to be that he was not.
He was simply paying attention primarily to the rendering of light, one of the cardinal problems of Impressionism. This was how painters and critics close to Monet understood his new works, acknowledging the talent they revealed.
When Durand-Ruel exhibited the Rouen Cathedral series in 1895, the friends of Monet’s youth accepted it, albeit not without certain reservations. Pissarro wrote to his son: “The Cathedrals are criticised by many, but praised by, among others, Degas, Renoir, and me. I so wanted you to see them all together, for I find in them the magnificent unity towards which I myself so aspire.” Shortly before this, Pissarro had informed his son that Cézanne liked the Cathedrals.
The idea of creating the series came to Monet in 1892 whilst he was staying in Rouen, where, enchanted by the cathedral, he lodged directly opposite it. From the window of his room he could see not the whole building but only the portal, and this determined the composition of the canvasses in the first part of the cycle.
In these the artist’s field of vision is invariably limited to the portal and the patch of sky above it. It is a ‘close-up’ composition with a part of the cathedral, transformed by the skilled hands of mason and sculptor into stone lacework, occupying the entire area of the canvas. Previously, looking from a cliff, a hill, or the window of a room, he liked to impart a sense of space by leaving the foreground free.
Now the subject was almost approached to point-blank range, and yet its proximity did not help to elucidate its nature, for light reduced it to next to nothing.
The other part of the cycle was produced in 1893 during a second visit to Rouen, when Monet took with him the canvasses he had already executed, intending to add the finishing touches to them.
He again studied the movement of light across the portal and, when he saw the effect he wanted, finished the work he had begun a year earlier; where the moment from the past did not recur, he took a fresh canvas and started again from scratch.
Rouen Cathedral, the Portal, Morning Sun: Harmony in Blue, 1893.
Oil on canvas, 92.2 × 63 cm. Bequest of Comte Isaac de
Camondo to the Louvre, 1911. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Rouen Cathedral: Setting Sun, 1892–1894.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 65 cm.
National Museum Wales, Cardiff.
During this second visit Monet did not only paint the cathedral from the viewpoint he had used in 1892; he rented another apartment as well, one which enjoyed a slightly different view of the building. From here a considerable portion of Saint-Romain’s tower was visible to the left of the entrance, and also some houses situated close to the tower.
On both his first and second visits Monet turned to his Cathedrals with an enthusiasm which bordered on frenzy. “I am worn out, I can’t go on”, he wrote to his wife in 1892. “And, something that I have never experienced before, I have spent a night filled with nightmarish dreams: the cathedral kept falling on me, and at times it seemed blue, at others pink, at others yellow.”
The following words come from a letter dated 1893: “I am painting like a madman, but no matter what you all say I am quite played out and am now good for nothing else.”
What is known of the creation of the Rouen Cathedral series and other pictures of these years makes it clear that Monet could now not