Garden at Sainte-Adresse
1867
Oil on canvas, 98.1 x 129.9 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sainte-Adresse, near Le Havre 1840 - 1872. The resort was also popular with Jongkind.

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse
1867

Madame Gaudibert
1868

Louvre, Paris

An unexpected facet of Monet's abilities appears in the skill and grace with which he carried out the always difficult commission of full-length, life-size portrait. M. and Mme Gaudibert of Le Havre were the generous and understanding couple who came to Monet's rescue in a year of cumulative misfortunes. His family disowned him because of his association with Camille by whom he had a child. None of the pictures he sent in the spring to the International Maritime Exhibition at Le Havre was sold and the canvases were seized by his creditors. In the summer, together with Camille and the child, he was thrown out of the lodgings he took at Fecamp. He came near to suicide. The order for portraits of the Gaudiberts and their purchase of other pictures by Monet tided him over the worst of his difficulties for a time and enabled him to resume the painting he had almost abandoned in despair. `Thanks to this gentleman of Le Havre who's been helping me out', he wrote to Bazille, `I'm enjoying the most perfect peace and quiet'. He looked forward again to doing `some worthwhile things'.

The portrait of Madame Gaudibert, painted in a chateau near Etretat, is none the less distinguished for being in a quiet key. The lady's dress was of that dull satin that offered little scope to the colourist but Monet gives dignity to its folds and adds color--discreetly subdued--in shawl, carpet and curtained background that lightens the effect. This is further enlivened by the touches of white at collar and cuffs and in the design of the shawl. Head and hands are painted with a sensitive simplicity.

Magpie
1868

Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Bathing at La Grenouillere
1869
Oil on white primed canvas, 73 x 92 cm

La Grenouillere was a riverside bathing and boating resort, popular among weekend trippers during the Second Empire (1852-1870) and after. It had a floating restaurant which is seen in another of the paintings executed by Monet during his two-month stay there in the late summer of 1869, and it appears in similar works by Renoir often painted sitting alongside Monet. The resort was situated on the Ile de Croissy, facing the left bank of the Seine.

In Monet's picture, which looks northeasterly, the afternoon light falls from behind the artist--a lighting effect he would have seen in Manet's studio work. However, although this full-face light is used, it is not exploited for the overall brilliance it gives to more open scenery. Monet only turned to this device in the 1870s. Instead, because of the close proximity of dense, overhanging trees, Monet has produced a study with alternating blocks of dark pierced by patches of dazzling sunlight, resulting in contrasts of light and shade reminiscent of Manet's work from the early 1860s. The juicy quality of Monet's paint is also similar to that found in Manet's work of this decade.

Unlike Manet's work, this painting was executed outdoors, and the brushwork is a witness to the speed required to capture the transitory effects which such scenery offered. The paint layer is generally opaque and hides the white ground, except in the most sketchily executed area, the upper right-hand corner. However, the white ground has helped retain the brilliance of the paint layer, which has recently been cleaned. A letter from Monet to his friend, the artist Frederic Bazille (1841-1870) on 25 September 1869, when he was working at La Grenouillere, makes it clear that Monet was still working in the traditional manner, seeing studies like this as preparatory work for larger, possibly studio executed works.

In this painting, Monet's brushwork is vigorous and the individually distinguishable brushmarks indicate that hog's hair brushes between about 1-2cm (2/5-4/5in) wide were used. There is little variation between the size of stroke in foreground and background to suggest depth, although more uniformly straight horizontal strokes and pastel shades on the distant water aid the impression of depth and recession. His brushwork is strongly descriptive, catching the character of different forms. Long unbroken strokes outline the boats, short horizontal daubs indicate the foreground water, abrupt jabs are used for flowers and foliage. Monet rejected traditional, smooth brushwork which created an illusion of surface texture; instead, his varied handling helps to evoke the actual natural textures. Monet's talent for summarizing the essential character of his landscapes was already apparent in his early caricatures, which demanded an ability to capture basic features concisely.

Monet's palette for this picture was already fairly limited, moving toward the restricted range of the Impressionists. Black--the absence of light--appears to have been abandoned, confirming his move away from Manet's influence. Most of the colors typically found in Monet's Impressionist palette are already in evidence. Vermilion, one of the few traditional colors used by Monet, has been identified virtually pure in the red flowers on the left, and mixed with other colors elsewhere. The greens were viridian, emerald and chrome, the latter a commercially produced mixture of Prussian blue and chrome yellow widely marketed in the period. All three greens were modern colors. Chrome yellow and lemon yellow mixed, were used in the brightest greens of the background trees. Because of their tendency to blacken in the presence of sulphides, the chrome yellows were abandoned by most of the Impressionists toward the end of the 1870s. Monet replaced them with the more stable cadmium yellows. Cobalt violet, available from 1859, was the first opaque pure violet pigment to appear on the market and was therefore rapidly adopted by artists. It was used here by Monet in mixtures, for example in the foreground water. The early eighteenth century inv ention, Prussian blue, was used by Monet in the darkest mixtures, such as the swimming costumes, while cobalt blue is the bright blue of the water. Lead white was consistently used by Monet throughout his career, but, as strong contrasts form the basis of this composition, its role in this picture was relatively limited. In his paintings from the 1870s on, lead white was liberally used in most of his color mixtures, bringing with it a new overall brilliance and pale pastel-like quality, as he sought to depict the light tones and minimal light-dark contrasts of full sunlit landscapes. Interestingly, a family of colors commonly used by Monet from the early 1870s, the red alizarin lakes, has not been identified on this picture. The artificial alizarin, more permanent than the natural organic root derivative madder lake, was only discovered in 1868, which may account for its absence here. Both Prussian blue and probably chrome green were abandoned by Monet during the 1870s. Monet combined slurred wet-in-wet mixing on the canvas with premixed hues. For example, the somber colors on the boats are obtained by mixing complementaries, like red and green, which give darkish neutral hues that are more colorful than those made by sullying a color with black.

The apparently accidental nature of the composition is deceptive. The striking horizontal of the duckboard, which cuts right across the picture surface, is placed almost exactly halfway up the picture. This was an unconventional device at this date. The broad shapes of light and dark above and below that line echo each other, giving a flat decorative unity to the composition which is reinforced by the harmonizing colors and patterned brushwork. Thus, even at this early stage in his career, Monet was already preoccupied with contrasts of naturalistic illusion and flat pattern, which were to become a feature of Impressionism, and to remain with Monet throughout his life.

Bathing at La Grenouillere (detail)
1869
Oil on white primed canvas, 73 x 92 cm

La Grenouillere
1869

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville
1870
Oil on canvas, 80 x 55 cm
Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Here Monet literally flies his flag in the face of the academics of the Paris Salon. Imagine the indignation occasioned by the brazenly unfinished banner that dominates the initial impression of this painting. Today, with hindsight we can appreciate the original handling used by Monet to impart the motion and vibrancy of the flag. It can almost be heard snapping in the wet ocean breeze. Compositionally, the flag counterbalances the strong perspective lines in the right and bottom portions of the canvas. These lines, in the receding gaslights and railing on the left, the pathway in the center, and the looming hotel on the right, converge to a remarkably close vanishing point. Only the white canopy halts the recession in time to keep the viewer from tumbling into a perspectival abyss. Monet intensifies the effect by cropping the hotel on the right and by the sharp angle of sun and shadow. Coming from high over the right shoulder, the strong sunlight creates a shadow in the bottom right corner of the canvas that gives the viewer an uncanny sense that the building continues beyond the right periphery of his vision. Suddenly, the viewer is jerked into the painting, which is of course what Monet intended by giving the picture such a powerful perspective. You find yourself joining the other hotel patrons in their stroll along the waterfront, preparing to doff your hat in cheerful greeting. And you join willingly, because the artist has succeeded in constructing a scene of warmth and conviviality that is extremely inviting. The delicacy of Monet's composition can be comprehended by the mental removal of the figures from the scene. Immediately, the entire feeling of warmth is lost and the viewer's participation in the painting is revoked. Monet has achieved a masterful synthesis of subject matter and composition to evoke the sensation of a light-hearted stroll along the French coast.

The Beach at Trouville
1870
Oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm
National Gallery, London

Breakwater at Trouville, Low Tide
1870
Oil on canvas, 54 x 66 cm
Szepmuveszeti Museum, Budapest

Monet was the unparalleled master of painting water. Here he has succeeded in reproducing the shallowness of the ocean at low tide. The dark rock, pier, and far bank of the water recede to a vanishing point located at the smallest sailboat in the distance. The strong perspective conveys the sensation that the water has flowed out in that direction. A pair of fishermen provide points of interest in the foreground that call attention to the shallowness of the remaining water. The small patch of flat water behind the man seated on a crate reveals the figures to be standing on a sand spit. The bare feet of the standing figure can almost be heard to squish in the wet sand. On this overcast day, there are no shadows. This allows the water reflections to stand out. The sails of the boats cast very flat and stationary reflections on the water surface that contribute to the perception of shallowness. The deeper water to the right provides a subtle reflection of the clouds that is easily overlooked at first glance. By painting low tide, of course, Monet suggests the eventual return of the water, which imparts a transience to the scene. Yet he accomplishes the portrayal of this moment in time with such artistry that the setting is transformed into something timeless and eternal. That is the central paradox of Monet's work: the transfiguration of an evanescent impression into an image of everlasting permanence.

The Red Kerchief: Portrait of Camille Monet
1870
Oil on canvas, 99 x 79.3 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art

The colors of this work are uncharacteristically muted. Only the red kerchief screams out, calling our attention to the figure outside. It is notable that she is specifically identified as the artist's wife in the title. The doorway or window is of course a standard painting motif; however, it is normally opened to allow a panoramic outside view. Here poor Mrs. Monet is not only locked out, but is obviously cold, grasping her coat to keep out the snowy chill. For a window composition, the perspective is surprisingly shallow. The horizon line, at Camille's elbow, flattens the picture. The result is that she is almost pushed up against the glass, as if begging to be let in from the cold. This is a disturbing canvas, expressing deep conflicts in the relationship of Claude and Camille Monet. We know that by late 1876, Monet had fallen in love with Alice Hoschede, the wife of one of his dealers, who bore his son Jean-Pierre two years prior to Camille's death.

Impression: soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise)
1873
Oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm
Musee Marmottan, Paris

Monet painted this picture of the sun seen through mist at the harbour of Le Havre when he was staying there in the spring of 1872. A sketch quickly executed to catch the atmospheric moment, it was catalogued as Impression: soleil levant when exhibited in 1874 in the first exhibition of the group (as yet described simply as the Societe Anonyme des Artistes-Peintres). The word `Impression' was not so unusual that it had never before been applied to works of art but the scoffing article by Louis Leroy in Le Charivari which coined the word Impressionnistes as a general description of the exhibitors added a new term to the critical vocabulary that was to become historic. It was first adopted by the artists themselves for their third group exhibition in 1877, though some disliked the label. It was dropped from two of the subsequent exhibitions as a result of disagreements but otherwise defied suppression.

Monet's Impression was not in itself a work that need be regarded as the essential criterion of Impressionism, vivid sketch though it is. There are many works before and after that represent the aims and achievements of the movement more fully. Yet it has a particular lustre and interest in providing the movement with its name.

Regate a Argenteuil
1872

Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Monet was intensely productive at Argenteuil in 1874 but although his output was prolific, he kept wonderfully clear of repetition and seems to have worked in a fever of inspiration in which he went on from strength to strength. He looked at the Seine from every angle, either from the shore or from his studio-boat on the river and found variety in the scenes of regatta the summer offered. Yet the variety was also that of a brush responsive to the changes of weather conditions and the different nuances they imparted to a scene. Some paintings were patterned with a series of restless touches that conveyed the suggestion of squally conditions, but in others---of which this is a brilliant example---he became masterfully broad in handling. Fascinated by the spread of sail in warm, creamy silhouette against blue sky, he made a bold simplification, treating the river and its reflections with equal breadth. It was a constantly practised hand that could sweep in those long foreground strokes so suggestive of the river's long placid ripple.

Renoir, who sometimes painted the same boats as Monet from the same viewpoint, was equally fascinated by their sails and was close to Monet, as represented in this picture, in the exclusion of detail and an almost abstract rendering of light. The two artists working side by side seem to have encouraged one another to feats of brilliance of the most adventurous kind.

Coquelicots (Poppies, Near Argenteuil)
1873

Musee d'Orsay, Paris

The Highway Bridge at Argenteuil
1874
Oil on canvas, 60 x 79.7 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

In this painting, Monet weaves a complex composition of interconnected forms. The foundation of the arrangement is four horizontal bands: the near shore, the water, the far shore and the sky. A pattern of shapes and lines is then overlaid to tie the different areas of the composition together. The dominant link is the bridge which on the pictorial level spans the river to bind the shores; on a compositional level, it spans the entire arrangement, connected to and linking all four of the basic forms in the painting. The boats provide an interesting latticework of lines with their masts and rigging. The central mast joins the water, far shore and sky, while the echoing lower mast connects visually all the way down to the unseen portion of the near shore. The cropping of this mast at the bottom of the canvas, a favorite Impressionist device, provides an especially dynamic link between the near shore (and by extension the very feet of the viewer) and the sky. The composition of this work is extremely pleasing to the eye, which is led effortlessly across the canvas and back again, into depth and returned to the picture plane, in a constant dynamic interplay of lines and forms.

Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor, Le Havre
1874
Oil on canvas, 60 x 101 cm
Private collection

La Promenade
1875

The Seine at Argenteuil
1874

The Bridge at Argenteuil
1874
Oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm
Louvre, Paris

Whereas Manet gained effect by sparkling accents standing out against low tones in his open-air pictures, Monet worked out the equation of light and colour more comprehensively and in more variety. In The Bridge at Argenteuil the equivalence is complete, the glow of light produced by pure and unmixed colour pervades the canvas and surrounds the forms appearing in it. The interplay between the short strokes indicative of ripples and the larger areas of colour is made with a typical flexibility of skill.

The accusation is sometimes made against the Impressionists that in their concern with atmosphere they lost sight of qualities of form and composition. Analysis of this painting would show, in spite of its apparent lack of pre-intended arrangement, how coherent it is in design. The verticals of the masts, of the houses and bridge piers and their reflections are set down firmly with an obvious sense of their pictorial value. There are those echoes of form and colour in which harmony of composition is to be found. The line of the furled sail is caught by the ribbed sky at the left; the warm tones of buildings are echoed in the details of the yachts; the dapple of clouds in the blue sky (with its deeper richness of blue in reflection) has its tonal equivalent in the reflections of the boats. To relax and look at the picture without analytic effort, however, is to see it resolve into an idyllic vision in which modern life has introduced no jarring note.

La femme au metier
1875
Oil on canvas, 65 x 55 cm

The Stroll, Camille Monet and Her Son Jean (Woman with a Parasol)
1875
Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

This masterpiece epitomizes the Impressionist concept of "the glance". It triumphs wonderfully in conveying the sensation of a snapshot in time, a stroll on a beautiful sunny day. The brushwork, feathery splashes of pulsating color, is critical in establishing this feeling of spontaneity. The portrayal of sunlight and wind also contributes to the movement in the scene. It is difficult to tell where the wispy clouds end and the wind-blown scarf of Mrs. Monet begins. The spiraling folds of her dress are a physical embodiment of the breeze that can be discerned fluttering across the canvas. The sunlight, coming from the right, provides a vigorous opposition to the wind blowing from the left. The wind and sun coalesce to form a swirling vortex in the center of the canvas, beginning with the bent grass blades and twisting through the white highlights at the back of the dress to the tip of the parasol. A singular aspect of the painting is the strong upward perspective. The view from below succeeds in silhouetting the figures against the sky, which intensifies the dynamic effect of sun and light. By depicting his son only from the waist up, Monet imparts a sense of depth to the setting. If this figure is covered up, the picture flattens to the extent that Mrs. Monet appears to be walking a grass tightrope, with the parasol now required to maintain her balance. Once Monet has outlined his figures precariously against the sky, he then anchors them firmly with color and line. The green underside of the parasol binds forcefully with the green of the hillside. The strong line of the handle leads the eye up to the green of the parasol and then, like a lightning rod, pulls the viewer back to the corresponding green of the grassy hillside. Shadows in the grass continue to draw the eye until it is anchored at the bottom of the canvas. Monet has achieved an exhilarating contrast between the swirling wind, clouds and light and the solid foundation of the hillside, with the figure of Mrs. Monet connecting the two.

Femme a l'ombrelle tournee vers la gauche
1875

Le bateau atelier (The Boat Studio)
1876
Oil on canvas, 72 x 59.8 cm
The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania

La Japonaise
1876

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Saint-Lazare Station
1877
Oil on canvas, 54.3 x 73.6 cm
National Gallery, London

Boulevard des Capucines
1873
Oil on canvas, 79.4 x 59 cm
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Landscape: Parc Monceau, Paris
1877

Rouen Cathedral: Full Sunlight
1894

Louvre, Paris

Monet's persistence in painting in series, beginning with the Gare Saint-Lazare and continuing in the Poplars and Haystacks, attains an impressive climax in the series he devoted to Rouen Cathedral. He began work at Rouen early in 1892, the year after he had finished the Haystacks and the last of the Poplars, and took a room above a shop in the rue Grand-Pont from which to observe the west front of the great church. He broke off to return to Giverny but resumed work at Rouen in the spring of 1893. The rest of that year and most of 1894 was spent in completing the paintings from memory. Twenty of them, ranging in effect from dawn to sunset, were exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1895 with great success. Monet's friend Clemenceau justly praised their `symphonic splendour'. Pissarro reproved adverse criticism in the letter to his son in which he remarked on the series as `the work, well thought out, of a man with a will of his own, pursuing every nuance of elusive effects, such as no other artist that I can see has captured'.

Monet, it is clear, was as little concerned with the subject, masterpiece of Gothic architecture though it was, as when painting his Haystacks. Where the building invited and challenged his ability was in the fretting of the surface as it caught the light and the profound effects of shadow in the deep recesses. The heavy grain of his thick paint gave its own animation to the facade. Working largely from memory he exchanged the more fluent technique of the plein-air picture finished at a sitting for this entirely opposite quality of carefully worked-up impasto. In addition, without direct reference to the building in reality, a poetic element in his nature seems to have come uppermost. There remains the sensation of Gothic without its detail curiously similar to that of Gaudi's Church of the Holy Family at Barcelona (mainly built about the same time as Monet was painting his Cathedrals)--another instance perhaps of the subtle and far-reaching influence of art nouveau. Otherwise, rather than conveying the atmospheric reality of sunlight, a painting such as the example given here can be appreciated as a gorgeous dream.

La cathedrale de Rouen, le portail, temps gris (Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal, Dull Weather)
dated 1894, painted 1892
Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm
Musee d'Orsay, Paris

La cathedrale de Rouen, le portail et la tour Saint-Romain, plein soleil, harmonie bleue et or (Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal and Saint-Romain Tower, Full Sunlight, Harmony in Blue and Gold)
dated 1894, painted 1893
Oil on canvas, 107 x 73 cm
Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Poplars on the Epte
1891

Monet painted the tall poplars on the banks of the river Epte near his house at Giverny under varying climatic and seasonal conditions in 1890 and again in 1891. A row of tall vertical stems backed by a receding line of other poplars provided the basic arrangement which he observed from his boat. He began his series of Haystacks before he had finished with the Poplars, a distant line of trees often forming a background. In both series he took enormous pains to wait for and entrap exactly the light each picture demanded. Yet in spite of the stubborn effort made with the aim of attaining a complete objective truth, causing him to take out a whole set of canvases to the chosen site on which he could work one at a time as a particular phase of light allowed, another element insidiously crept in. The subject in constant repetition came to matter less and less; aesthetic considerations apart from a scientific naturalism came into play. The slenderness of the poplars seemed to take on something of the exaggerated elegance of the contemporaneous art nouveau. The color scheme became more of a contrived and artificially heightened contrast between blues and purples, oranges and yellows. The new aspect of Monet's art after he had reached the age of fifty can be appreciated in the ecstatic color of this example.

With the public the series were a great success, the Haystacks especially. Fifteen of them exhibited at Durand-Ruel's were all sold within a few days at 3,000 to 4,000 francs each. But there were some critics and some among Monet's Impressionist confreres who were dubious of the course he now pursued. The adverse opinion gained strength that Impressionism so interpreted involved too great a sacrifice of substance and construction. Yet they attached too little value to the poetic and abstract characteristics of Monet's art.

Poplars along the River Epte, Autumn
1891
Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm
Private collection

Water Lilies (The Clouds)
1903
Oil on canvas, 74.6 x 105.3 cm
Private collection

Water Lilies
1906
Oil on canvas, 87.6 x 92.7 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago

Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part
1916-1923

Orangerie, Paris

Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise
1865
Oil on canvas, 30 x 60 cm
San Diego Museum of Art

This is an early work done a quarter-century before the famous Wheatstack series of 1890-91. In those later works, Monet succeeded in expressing the immutable essence of the Wheatstacks; here they are integrated into the overall landscape. The relative sizes of the Haystacks as well as the inclination of the low-lying clouds leads the eye forcefully toward the vanishing point of the rising sun. This leftward-leaning composition is accentuated by the exaggerated horizontality of the canvas. The muted colors and relatively finished brushwork, along with the pyramidal shapes of the haystacks, convey a sense of permanence that somewhat contradicts the depiction of something as transient as a sunrise. This is an important early reference point illustrating the artistic problems Monet worked to resolve as his style developed.

Meule, Effet de Neige, le Matin (Morning Snow Effect)

Meule, Degel, Soleil Couchant

Meule, Soleil Couchant
1891
73,3 x 92.6 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1890-1891
Oil on canvas, 60 x 100 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago

The Thames at Westminster (Westminster Bridge)
1871
Oil on canvas, 47 x 72.5 cm
Collection Lord Astor of Hever; National Gallery, London

Of Monet's and Pissarro's experience of England during the Franco-German war, Pissarro was later to write, `Monet and I were very enthusiastic over the London landscapes'. However, they chose different aspects of it: Pissarro, what he described as `at that time a charming suburb' (Lower Norwood) and Monet, Hyde Park and Westminster. Monet's paintings of Hyde Park in 1871, though nothing more than stretches of grass and pathways with an indication of strolling figures are remarkably true to character though the principal product of his stay in London was the beautiful view of Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, dated 1871.

The suggestion of color in the fog-laden sky is certainly Impressionist but the silhouette of the Parliament buildings does not suggest any debt to Turner, whose works the two French artists now saw. Monet observed and made use of the same flattening result of the heavy atmosphere as Whistler, whose Nocturnes belong to the same decade.

The resemblance, fortuitous as it may be, is increased rather than otherwise by the evidently well-considered relation of the foreground timber pier and the buildings and bridge behind, a reminder that Monet like Whistler was an admirer of the Japanese prints in which these decorative relationships had a studied importance. Monet was to come nearer to Turner in the later more vividly chromatic paintings of the Thames at Westminster made on his later visits in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Breaking Through the Fog
1904
Oil on canvas, 81 x 92 cm
Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Monet used color with an increasing freedom in these later years. London as he saw it again at the beginning of the present century suggested chromatic richnesses far beyond any he had contemplated in 1871. This view of the Houses of Parliament in 1904 with the sun coming through fog departed from the Whistlerian silhouette of thirty-three years before to picture densities of purple and blue with a contrast of gold that already forecast Andre Derain's fauve paintings of the city.

Le Parlement, Effet de Brouillard
1904
82.6 x 92.7 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg

Houses of Parliament, London
1905
Oil on canvas, 81 x 92 cm
Musee Marmottan, Paris

The Floating Ice
1880

Path in the Ile Saint-Martin, Vetheuil
1881

The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil
1881
Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Private collection

This is one of the flattest landscapes ever painted. At around the same time, Cezanne was flattening his still lifes by distorting the tables to a vertical orientation. Monet stops short of distortion through a judicious choice of subject. A hillside staircase provides the form for a dramatic flattening of the painting. Monet accentuates this effect with a strong dividing line going up the right side of the stairs, between the houses and continuing up the chimney to the top of the canvas. The sky and buildings are highly geometrized forms whose flatness serves to bring the deepest part of the composition back up to the picture plane. The stairs are not individually distinguishable; if not for the children placed on them, they could be read as a cliff. The children themselves are frozen in full frontal portrayal, which again contributes to the flattening effect. There are few perspectival clues provided. No clouds are shown that would break up the solid plane of dark blue sky. No shadows can be discerned, even though the scene is bathed in sunlight. This results in a number of interesting ambiguities. Are the buildings next to each other, nearly touching? Or is one or the other to be perceived as in front? The structure on the left seems to be directly at the top of the stairs. But the blue roof on the right draws a line across the pink roof that brings it abruptly forward, hanging precariously over the hillside. Even the sunflowers are puzzling. The blossoms do not diminish in size as would be expected as they near the top of the canvas. As a result, they can be read either as a wall of plants at the base of the staircase, or as rows of vegetation terracing the hillside. This work, so unlike much of Monet's work in its flat plane composition, is a testament to the breadth of his oeuvre.

Rock Arch West of Etretat (The Manneport)
1883
Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.3 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Garden in Bordighera, Impression of Morning
1884
Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81.5 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Bulbfield and Windmill Near Leyden
1886

State Museum, Amsterdam

The Artist's Garden at Giverny
1900

Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Monet's paintings of his water-garden and water-lilies at Giverny occupied him for many years in the latter part of his life and were his last great work. Like the works of Turner in the final stage, they were for a long time misunderstood and unappreciated but similarly revived in esteem in the light of modern reappraisal. By the end of 1890 Monet was making enough from the sales of his pictures to buy his house at Giverny outright and soon after began improvements to the garden which included the formation of a pond from a marshy tract by damming a stream that ran into the river Epte. He had a bridge built over the pond `in Japanese taste' and his first paintings of the water-garden in a series, 1899-1900, give prominence to the bridge with water-lilies beneath and weeping willows, by that time well-grown, around it. These pictures formed a quiet beginning to what was to become an increasingly exciting enterprise.

In the second phase of forty-eight pictures produced between 1903 and 1908, he dispensed with the bridge which had been a somewhat conventional accessory, set his angle of vision nearer to the water surface and composed his picture simply of the water-lilies and reflections in the water, with only a suggestion of trees and other vegetation on the banks in the background. The pond became a sort of magic mirror holding such amazing depth and beauty of color and variety of light as can be appreciated here. More akin to Japan in spirit that the hump-backed bridge was the decorative sense that Monet now displayed in the selection of the areas of blue and green leaf and the touches of white and red in vivid design against the deeps of color to the right and in the foreground of this painting. As the series continued Monet made modifications in his scheme of design; although he used large canvases he limited the number of plants to appear in them and increased their size. Finally he painted them from almost directly overhead, thus eliminating normal perspective, the play of light on the surface place being now the main feature. In this decorative treatment, as may be noticed in other works of the turn of the century, there came a certain suggestion of art nouveau.

The Japanese Bridge
Probably 1918-24
Oil on canvas, 89 x 116 cm
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

After 1900, two ambitious projects, both far from Giverny, concluded Monet's search for new motifs. The first (for which he made at least three trips to London between 1899 and 1904) was the extensive, multiple series representing the Thames River, the Waterloo and Charing Cross bridges, and the House of Parliament.