Monet and the Birth of Impressionism

One of the most famous Impressionists, Claude Monet (1840-1926) gave a name to one of art's most beloved movements. It was Monet's "Impression Sunrise" painting at the 1874 Salon des Refuses that coined the artistic movement's moniker, Impressionism. However, it was a sarcastic critic (Louis Leroy) who labeled Monet and his colleagues unfavorably as Impressionists, and compared the painting by Monet to wallpaper, noting "wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished." Neither Monet nor Leroy could have imagined in 1874 just what eternal value this group was creating by giving birth to a new way of painting that would be beloved by so many, from the late 1800s until the present day.

BACKGROUND
Claude Monet didn't begin his artistic life as an Impressionist. Born to an affluent family in the northern French city of Le Havre, Monet's interest in art began at an early age, where he was known for drawing caricatures of local personalities. As most artists of the time, he entered a private art school, studying under an Academy master, Charles Gleyre, along with fellow students August Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred Sisley, where he learned traditional painting techniques.

Aware of artistic developments in naturalism and realism, Claude Monet was drawn to the works of the avant garde, and he admired painters like Jean-Baptiste Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Edouard Manet. In the 1860s, Monet and other artists from the Atelier Gleyre began experimenting with a new, more spontaneous style of painting that attempted to capture the fleeting, temporal moment, instead of imitating reality.

BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM
This new style of painting did not sit well with the more traditional masters of art. The paintings of Claude Monet and his fellow experimenters were rejected by the Salon, the official exhibition of the French Academy of Art in Paris. The painters responded to this rejection by staging their own show in 1874, held in the studio of a photographer, Nadar, and dubbed the Salon des Refuses. The group went on to stage seven more exhibitions of their joint work. Gradually, their ideas began to gain acceptance, and the artists themselves each went their own way.

IMPRESSIONISTIC STYLE
Just why was Impressionism so scandalous? In a word, the painting style was revolutionary for the time. Impressionists broke with the realism tradition by beginning to visualize the physical world in a new way. New sensitivity was given to the fleeting, mobile quality of time. It rejected the attention to detail, which was the focus of the realism movement. Compared with realism, Impressionism had a coarse, unfinished look. Yet it was that very quality of immediacy that could dissolve a flower's bloom into a pool of iridescent light.

Monet himself used a palette of light, bright colors to capture the optical effects created by natural light on the landscape, paying little attention to details, using instead highly visible, sketchy, "undiscriminating" brushwork to capture a scene quickly. It was sensitivity to the changing quality, the transformative effect of light that Claude Monet was able to capture in his finest works of art.

MONET'S WORK AND LIFE
Once the Impressionists went their own ways, each to explore their own style and subject matter, Claude Monet began to focus seriously on his study of light. While others were painting still life and models in studios, Monet was en plein air, savoring the outdoors and the impact light has on objects. From 1871-1878, for example, Monet lived in Argentuil, a Parisian suburb along the Seine River, where he had a studio aboard a boat. There he painted 170 canvases. Rarely taking the boat far, he instead moored in quiet stretches of the river, painting the light on water or capturing sailing regattas.

In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, where he painted some of his most famous paintings, and worked until his death. Giverny, just north of Paris, is where he developed and expanded the land to create his own water gardens, which were the subject of his painting for many years. The lily ponds and flower gardens gave birth to some of his most famous paintinga. "The Waterlily Pond" (1899), for example, is one of his most famous works, and is a bedazzling work of light and color, nearly abstract with its brilliant greens and yellows.

Prior to his move to Giverny, Monet had spent years studying the elusive quality of light through a series of paintings (for example, a series of haystacks or the light falling on Rouen Cathedral) of the outside world. After his move, the gardens, plants, water, and Japanese bridge of Giverny became the central focus of his work. Claude Monet was an artist, a master of light, season, and time of day, capturing each in his Impressionist paintings. He worked steadily, despite failing health, in Giverny until his death in 1926.