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Claude Monet (1840-1926) . Claude Monet is the most famous Impressionist artist. He was completely dedicated to the idea of painting out of doors. His goal was to capture a single moment of time and light in his painting.
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Claude Monet is the most famous Impressionist artist. • He was completely dedicated to the idea of painting out of doors. • His goal was to capture a single moment of time and light in his painting. • He worked tirelessly to achieve this effect. Towards the end of his life his paintings became almost abstract with swirling colours dissolving into light. Early influences • Monet came from Le Havre in Normandy and he began painting there. • He then went to Paris, where he met Camille Pissarro and became interested in landscape painting. • He met the Barbizon painters and learned to appreciate the benefits of working en plein air. Claude Monet (1840-1926) His Life
Paris • He enrolled at Charles Gleyre’s studio in Paris and met fellow students Frederic Bazille, Alfred Sisley and Pierre August Renoir. • The students regularly met after class in the Café Guerbois and had lively discussions on art with other young artists like Paul Cezanne and Edgar Degas. • In 1865 the Salon accepted two of Monet’s seascapes but the critics confused his name with Edouard Manet. Financial difficulties • Life began difficult for Claude Monet in the late 1860’s. He had very little success at the Salon. • Financially he was very badly off and his girlfriend Camille became pregnant. • His large painting Women in the Garden was rejected by the Salon so he abandoned figure painting. • He spend the summer of 1869 painting riverside pictures with his friend Renoir. These marked the real beginning of Impressionism.
Success • He began to have success but his wife died in 1879. • They had been living with the Hochede family who were good friends of theirs. • Alice Hochede had cared for his wife and after she died, she and Monet remained together. They married after the death of her husband. • They bought a house in Giverny on a small river near the Seine. • They had Monet’s two sons plus six of Alice’s children. • It was here that he developed his famous water garden with a Japanese bridge. • He lived here for 43 years, painting until the end of his life. • He died in 1926 at the age of 86.
Although Monet loved plants and flowers, he was not interested in distinguishing them in a painting He was more interested in the reflections on the water. • In Water Lily Pond-Harmony in Green, the surface of the painting is a rich carpet of colour, with brushstrokes of yellow, pink and lavender woven in with the shimmering green of the plants. Water Lily Pond-Harmony in Green 1899
He left out any hint of sky, enveloping the viewer in the beauty of the sunlit garden. • He let each layer of paint dry before he painted the next one. • His brushstrokes were thick and heavy, gradually building up a three-dimensional, rough texture. • This can be seen particularly on the depiction of the bridge, making it appear to stand out from the background.
Travelling in France • During the 1870’s and 1880’s Monet gradually refined his technique. • He made man trips to scenic areas of France to study the most brilliant effects of light and colour possible. • From 1890 he concentrated on a series of pictures in which he painted the same subject at different times of the day in different lights. • Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral are the best known example of these. • In 1914 he had a special studio built in the grounds of his house and here he worked on huge canvases. • In the last years of his life, he painted a series of water lilies called Les Grandees Decorations. He donated these to the French state and they are now displayed as he intended in two oval-shaped rooms in the Musee d’Orangerie in Paris, bathed in natural light from the glass roof.
Camille Pissarro was a very important figure in the Impressionist movement. • He was about ten years older than the others and he constantly advised and encouraged them. • He organised the exhibition and was the one who exhibited at all eight Impressionist shows. • As well as teaching the younger artists, he also learned from them; and yet he remained insecure about his own work. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)