Be Transported by These 5 Claude Monet Paintings

While Vincent van Gogh is associated in the public consciousness with sunflowers, Claude Monet’s name is inextricably linked with waterlilies. Almost as passionate a gardener as he was a painter, Monet bought a boggy piece of land next to his house at Giverny in 1892 with the intention of transforming it into a water garden “for the pleasure of the eye, and for motifs to paint.” He created a pond surrounded by weeping willows and covered with exotic waterlilies, which became the focus of his art for the rest of his life. He painted the waterlily-covered surface of the pond over and over again, day after day, year after year, and held in his mind the idea of turning his waterlily canvases into a giant decorative scheme that would encircle the viewer. In 1914, his friend the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau persuaded him to embark upon the project. For the next decade Monet worked obsessively on his waterlily paintings in a vast studio specially built to house the six-foot-high canvases, which were mounted on mobile easels so that he could experiment with grouping them together. Selected canvases were joined to create eight waterlily panels. These were presented to the French state and eventually installed in two oval rooms in the Orangerie the year after Monet’s death. After six years’ renovations, the rooms were reopened to the public in 2006, allowing once again the experience of being surrounded by the peace and beauty of Monet’s “enchanted pond” while the hubbub of Paris continues outside. (Jude Welton)

The artistic movement Impressionism owes its name to this influential work by Claude Monet. Impression, Sunrise was first shown in 1874 at an independent exhibition organized by a group of artists including Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. The show served as an alternative to the traditional, state-run Salon, allowing artists to work in radically new ways. In a review of the exhibition, the critic Louis Leroy condemned Impression, Sunrise, arguing that it was nothing more than a sketch and, in a negative context, titled the show “The Exhibition of the Impressionists,” a term that the group proudly adopted.

Leroy’s response is understandable: Monet’s painting broke many artistic conventions. The artist’s work does indeed have a sketchlike quality, due to his loose, broken brushwork that does not define what it represents. This technique is largely the result of the Impressionist desire to capture the fleeting moment en plein air. Impression, Sunrise was not executed in a studio but from a window overlooking the harbor of Le Havre from which Monet painted the modern city awakening at dawn, requiring quick brushstrokes before the view changed. Conversely, Impression, Sunrise is also a calculated work that shows an interest in color theory. While the sun appears to pierce the morning mist because of its intense orange color, in reality it has the same luminance as its surroundings. In a black-and-white photograph, the sun is almost indistinguishable, an effect that Monet did not achieve by accident. The painting is in the collection of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. (William Davies)

At the beginning of the 20th century, landscape painting was the dominant genre of modern art. The Impressionists’ bright and spontaneous depictions of nature appealed to the town-dwelling middle classes, for whom the countryside was primarily a place for leisure and enjoyment. In 1890 Claude Monet bought a house in Giverny, France. He developed its gardens, introducing an ornamental lily pond, a Japanese-style bridge, and other stunning features. The garden became his main focus, and he spent most of his time painting visions of evanescent light and color from his surroundings. Painting outdoors at first, he would then return to his studio to work and rework his canvases, which became layered and complex. The Japanese bridge was one of his favorite subjects, and he painted it over and again, catching it in different moods and lights. From 1908, his eyesight suffered as cataracts formed, distorting his vision. It is interesting to note that the paintings produced while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is a characteristic symptom of cataracts. He had effective treatment in 1923, but this painting, completed after surgery and today in the collection of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, remained one of his most abstract works. While the bridge can be delineated at the center, the energetic brushstrokes form a swirl of trees, plants and water. He explored his subject so closely that the whole dissolved into the interplay of color, light, foliage and reflection. The thick, impasto brushwork later influenced the Abstract Expressionists. (Susie Hodge)

In October 1890, Claude Monet wrote in a letter to his future biographer Gustave Geffroy: “I am hard at it, grinding away at a series of different effects, but at this time of the year the sun sets so quickly I cannot keep up with it….” He was describing his Haystack (“Grainstack”) series of paintings, and he went on to say that what he was after was what he called “instantaneity”—the “envelope” of light that unifies a scene for an instant, before changing to create a new momentary effect. Though the paintings were begun out of doors, they were “harmonized” in the studio, and Monet intended them to be viewed together.

Compare this image to his Haystack at Sunset, Frosty Weather. The powerful compositions are very similar, with an almost abstract simplicity. But in Frosty Weather the stack and the entire scene glow hot in the fiery sunset, while in this painting the dark shape of the haystack is enveloped in the chilly light of a late winter afternoon and set against the ice blue of the snow-covered field and the cool blue of the landscape “band” behind it. The winter sun is low in the sky, and lights the stack from behind, casting a long elliptical shadow across the canvas. When 15 Haystack paintings were exhibited together in 1891, the show was a triumph. Critics not only saw Monet’s unique rendering of light effects, but they also responded to the French rural subject matter. The artist may also have been concerned with the haystacks themselves as symbols of the fertility and prosperity of the French agricultural landscape. Haystack in the Morning, Snow Effect is part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (Jude Welton)

Today the name Claude Monet is virtually synonymous with the artistic movement known as Impressionism. Indeed, the name of the movement derives from a painting the artist himself executed in 1873, entitled Impression, Sunrise. If there is one salient aspect that sets Monet’s oeuvre apart from his fellow Impressionists, it would perhaps be his meticulous exploration of the behavior of natural light at different times. Monet’s Haystack (also known as “Grainstack”) series was painted between 1890 and 1891, and it reflected the artist’s passion for rendering his everyday experiences. The stacks themselves stood directly behind his house in Giverny. The series as a whole tracks the effects light, both seasonal and during different times of the day, has upon the appearance and the actual structure of the haystack. In Haystack at Sunset, Frosty Weather, the haystack occupies the left foreground of the painting wherein its apex abuts the line of the horizon. This subtly elevates the painting from being merely an instance of naturalistic description to something which is entirely more abstract. The stack is seen in shadow and forms a silhouette that, although it is set apart from its immediate surroundings, provides continuity through Monet’s palette, which consists of a significant amount of white. What Monet brings to such an apparently mundane subject is a sense of wonder and awe, and he renders concrete the idea that nature, far from being static and fixed, is in fact dynamic and even revelatory. (Craig Staff)