Claude Monet: works, analysis and meanings

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French painter representative of Impressionism, recognized both for his pictorial findings in the treatment of light, as for having made the painting that would give the name to the movement.

Along with other artists, Monet was responsible for having opened the door to the originality of the plastic language through the treatment of light and the study of the perception of color. Let's get to know some of his most important works in this article.

1. Lunch on the grass, 1865-1866

In 1863, critics destroyed Edouard Manet at the Official Paris Salon because of his work Breakfast on the grass. However, Claude Monet had been fascinated by the piece and decided to make his own version of it as a tribute to the controversial painter. Monet's would have the ambitious dimensions of four meters high by twenty meters long. It was, at the same time, a challenge.

He began to paint the Lunch on the grass in 1865, watching to participate in the 1866 salon. His precarious finances made him abandon the project and he had to offer it as a guarantee of payment of the rent. The canvas was rolled up and stored by its temporary owner until Monet retrieved it in 1884. Faced with the notable deterioration, he had to cut it back. Only two fragments remain of the work: the central one and the left side.

In the scene, the painter represents a picnic lunch in an informal and everyday air. Marking distance with Edouard Manet, he removes the nude and dresses all the characters, whose costumes reveal his lifestyle. The characters are certainly bourgeois who celebrate the feast of living, without scandal, without significance. Monet is not interested in thematic controversy any more than in plastic language.

Although the original piece did not manage to be completely preserved, a Study for lunch on the grass. The most obvious difference is in the young man without a beard who appears seated on the tablecloth. This character is replaced by a bearded man who looks like a reference to Gustave Coubert, a realist painter much admired of Monet who would have deigned to visit him in his workshop in the days when Monet worked at the draft.

2. Camille with green dress, 1866

Picture Camille with green dress by Claude Monet was exhibited in the Official Salon of 1866 and was widely accepted, something that was not to the liking of Edourad Manet who, being confused with Monet, received congratulations by mistake. In addition, Manet had been in the eye of criticism in 1863 and the Official Salon had rejected him in 1865 because of his painting Olympia.

In his book Impressionism, Paul Smith compares the picture Camille with green dress with the work The lady with a glove by Carolus-Duran, a disciple of the painter David and a regular participant in royalist circles in Paris. Although the Carolus-Duran piece is later than Monet's, the comparison allows Smith to conclude that Monet had taken an important part of the realistic pictorial language, widely valued in the great Hall Official. Hence he was admitted.

In his analysis, Smith distinguishes that Monet has made the dress wear, using an artificial pose typical of fashion illustrations. At the same time, it has provided the scene with artificial light to accentuate the character. Monet reveals elements that recall the lighting and warmth of Coubert and the line of Manet, which exerted great influence on him.

3. Women in the garden, 1867

Paul Smith compares the canvas Women in the garden by Monet with Minerva and Thanks by Charles Greyre, in whose workshop Monet worked for some time. With this, Smith highlights the true revolution of the impressionist generation.

As was customary in art, Greyre represents an episode of a literary-narrative nature, trying to eternalize Platonic ideals of beauty and goodness through the representation of the myth of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, and the three Graces, symbol of beauty. Dumped into the content, the painter's technique becomes invisible so that the subject shines, without leaving a trace of it.

A year later, Monet executed a canvas that also represents four women in a vegetal environment, but these will be ordinary women. The painter did not represent an eternal value, but a fleeting and fleeting moment, a funny meeting between friends who celebrate bourgeois life. They are the symbol of the new middle class that seeks to build its own value.

Monet does not hide technique on canvas. On the contrary, he exhibits it, shows the line, guides the viewer's attention to the plastic language that Greyre and all the traditional painters have deliberately concealed.

As was typical of the germinating style, Monet takes advantage of blue and green colors to shade and modify the skin of the characters. He portrays before the intense summer light that takes over the scene. What is important, then, will be the pictorial language.

See also Impressionism: characteristics, works and authors.

4. La Grenouillére, 1869.

La Grenouillère It is a series of various marine-type paintings from different angles and moments. In this canvas, Monet is extensively involved with the treatment of light and its effects on objects. He quickly surrenders to the full form of impressionism.

From work to fresh airA thing only possible at that time thanks to the invention of oil tubes, Monet took advantage of a hasty line to give life to the luminous impressions and the transience of the moment. The spectator attends the scene as one more. There is no moral judgment, there is no thematic significance. Interest has turned to plastic language.

Renoir made a version of this same scene with Monet.

It may interest you: Renoir: the most important works of the impressionist painter

5. Field of poppies, 1873

In 1871 Monet temporarily settled in Argenteuil, where he solidly developed the style that he had been discovering, thanks also to the landscapes offered by that town. From this stage is the work Field of poppies, exhibited in the Hall of the Rejected in 1874 along with 8 other pieces.

Two sections separated by oblique lines are distinguished in the table. On the left, in the poppy field, red predominates, while on the right, bluish-green predominates. In the scene, the poppy field is crossed by two pairs of woman and child. The one standing out in the foreground is Monet's wife, Camille, and her son Jean, who were frequently models for his paintings.

6. Impression of the rising sun, 1872

Among the paintings that Monet presented in the Hall of the Rejected, one caused a real scandal: Impression of the rising sun. Influenced by the work of the English romantic painter William Turner, Monet applied thick brushstrokes, almost stains that barely hint at figuration. The principle of complementarity of colors makes its entrance open. The colors, placed side by side, create the perception of complete hues.

The atmosphere looks cloudy and the waters seem to move with the passage of small boats. Far from a bucolic landscape, Monet represents an industrialized port in the background, where steam engines and other structures intervene in the celestial mist. He has not hidden anything. Life is there for the painter to portray. The sun, which resists touching those structures, leaves its orange trail on the waves of the sea.

After the exhibition of 1874, the art critic Louis Leroy, starting from the name of the provocative liezo, accused Monet of limiting himself to a mere "impressionism". With the greatest dignity, Monet and his generation assumed this disqualification as the name of the movement.

See also 16 cool paintings by Vincent Van Gogh.

7. Serie Saint-Lazare Station, 1877

Around 1877 Monet moved back to Paris and, responding to his wishes to be a painter of his time, instead of leaving aside the everyday world of the industrial city, it incorporates it into its canvases. It will be the Saint-Lazare station that gives Monet the opportunity to continue exploring the luminosity and textures of steam. The painter will dedicate seven canvases to the Saint-Lazare station.

Unlike other series where Monet portrays the same landscape under different atmospheric variables, such as Rouen cathedral, on Saint Lazare Station Monet will portray not only different atmospheres, but different objectives, settings and perspectives of life at the station.

8. Serie Haystacks, 1890-1891

Around 1883 Monet moved to Giverny with his new partner, Alice Hoschedé, after Camille passed away in 1879. There he is dedicated to exploring the new possibilities that the local landscape offers him. Without planning it like that, he ended up developing one of his best-known series, Haystacks, covering a total of 25 canvases. Monet manages to capture the light diversity that he distinguishes at each period of the year, on the piles of wheat.

Monet's aesthetic ambitions grew over time. Some of these pictures were later retouched in the studio, to reach a higher level of perfection. In reality, he needed, says Paul Smith, not only to portray a lighting effect, but to make a harmonious composition and an aesthetically unified series.

9. Serie Rouen cathedral, 1890-1894

At a time when France was witnessing a revival of interest in Catholicity, Monet dedicates to develop this series inspired by the Cathedral of Rouen, located in the French region of Normandy.

It was the view from the window of a studio he had rented across the street. The series had more than thirty pieces and eight of them were sold before being exhibited.

In addition to capturing the luminosity, a characteristic element of his work, Monet masterfully manages to capture the porosity and texture of the stone façade of the religious building.

10. Serie Parliament London, 1900 to 1904

During a period of stay in London together with his wife Alice, Monet is dedicated to portraying the view from St. Thomas Hospital, which allows him to capture the River Thames and the surrounding landscape. The series of the London parliament and also the Charing Cross Bridge and the Waterloo Bridge.

In the series about him London parliament, Monet manages to represent the building interwoven with the characteristic fog of the city. But this time the parliament will be almost a phantasmagoria, a silhouette that opens in a charged and cloudy background, turned into shadow. He reminds us of the works of William Turner.

Years later he would do the same in the Venice Series, which he would visit together with his wife by the hand of a group of art enthusiasts, and in which he would capture various scenarios of the emblematic city.

11. Serie Lily pads, 1883-1924.

During his stay in Giverny, Monet cultivated a beautiful garden with a Japanese bridge. That Giverny garden wasn't just Monet's hobby. It was also his source of inspiration, especially in the last years of his life.

The painter developed over the years a true passion for depicting on his canvases those wonders of his garden: the water lilies. The series would reach a total of 250 canvases, today distributed in many rooms and galleries around the world.

Part of Lily pads Monet's were painted around the time of the First World War. Although Monet was in a private and quiet world, Paul Smith says that from his house you could hear the passing of the trains with the ammunition. According to the researcher, it is possible to interpret this series as an effort by the painter to preserve the world that the war threatened to destroy.

In fact, Monet would end up donating a part of the series to the French State as a symbol of peace, just after the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne, signed on November 11, 1918. This sample, today conserved in the Museum of the Orangerie, is considered the "Sistine Chapel of Impressionism".

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