Monet and Impressionism

In April 1874, thirty artists who had been refused or badly hung by the official Salon rented the photographer Nadar’s old studio on the boulevard des Capucines and put on their own exhibition. A critic named Louis Leroy walked through it, stopped in front of a small harbour scene by Claude Monet called Impression, Sunrise, and wrote a mocking review under the headline “Exhibition of the Impressionists”. The name was meant to sting. The group adopted it within a few years.

What Impressionism changed

Three things, and they are easier to see than to describe. The painters worked from direct observation rather than studio convention, often outdoors and often fast. They stopped blending the brushstroke away, so the surface of the painting stays visibly made of paint. And they treated shadow as coloured rather than as an absence of light: a shadow on snow could be blue, a shadow under a poplar could be violet. The Metropolitan Museum’s essay on Impressionism sets out how radical that was against the finish the Salon expected.

What the group never shared was a subject. Degas worked indoors under artificial light. Renoir kept painting people. Pissarro moved between fields and streets. The label describes a method far better than it describes a set of paintings, which is why the eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 look so different from one another.

Where Monet went further than anyone

Monet took the method to its logical end, and the result is the thing he is remembered for: the series. Rather than paint a haystack, he painted the same haystacks in a field near his house over and over, at different hours and in different weather, until the stack itself stopped being the subject. Then he did it again with poplars, again with the facade of Rouen cathedral, again with the Thames and the Houses of Parliament seen through London fog.

The argument underneath is simple and slightly radical: the subject of a painting is not the object, it is the light falling on it. A cathedral at nine in the morning and the same cathedral at five in the afternoon are two different paintings, and neither of them is really about architecture.

This is also why his canvases reward being looked at twice. Close up, a Rouen facade is a crust of unmixed colour with almost no drawing in it. Step back and the stone assembles itself out of nothing.

Giverny, and the last thirty years

Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and spent the rest of his life there. In 1893 he diverted a branch of a nearby river to build a water garden, planted it, and then painted it for more than twenty years. The late water lily canvases abandon the horizon entirely: no bank, no sky, no scale, just the surface of the pond with reflections in it. Cataracts clouded his sight badly in his last decade, and the colour in some of those years runs hot and strange.

He was still working on the largest of them when he died in 1926, aged eighty-six. They were installed in Paris the following year, and they are the reason so much twentieth-century painting looks the way it does.

How a Monet reads on a wall

Two practical consequences follow from all of the above, and they matter when you choose a size.

First, a Monet needs viewing distance. The image resolves at four or five feet, not at arm’s length, so these paintings do their work at the far end of a room rather than in a corridor you brush past. Second, the series logic means light in your own room matters more than usual: a canvas built out of morning colour will not behave the same way on a north wall as on a south one.

It is also why the works in this collection are painted by hand in oil rather than printed. In a Monet the visible stroke is not decoration applied over the image, it is how the image is built. A surface that reproduces the mark reproduces the argument; a flat print of the same picture keeps the colours and loses the reason they were put there.

Follow the life

The Met essay on Claude Monet sets the sixty years out in order; the catalogue below follows the same route, canvas by canvas.

See the movement

The Met essay on Impressionism places his work alongside fellow Impressionists and explains what the group was actually arguing about.

Shop by light

Water lilies, gardens, coastlines and winter mornings each carry a different hour of the day into a room.