Claude Monet: An Impressionist Genius

Ask someone to name a single artist, let alone an Impressionist one, and many will answer, “Monet”. Few artists have made such a singular impact as the impressionist painter Claude Monet. This special display explores how and why Monet became the artist he was and the impact he made.

The display opens with L’Ancienne rue de la Chaussee, an early painting by Monet depicting the town of Argenteuil. 1872 was an important year for the French Impressionists as it was shortly before the first of their eight exhibitions took place and the genre’s identify took form. In fact, the piece of art that gave Impressionism its name, Impression, Sunrise, was painted in the same year as this Argenteuil painting.

The town was an important hub for Monet and his fellow Impressionists. Monet spent six years in the town, honing his craft. Other Impressionists including Monet’s friend Alfred Sisley would spend time in the hamlet. In fact, Monet and Sisley would paint side-by-side including this street scene of Argenteuil. Sisley’s version is now in the esteemed Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Both artists captured a moment in which the rural nature of the Argenteuil holds out against the looming industrialization. Impressionism was not just the force of a single man but developed through friendship, conversations, and joint painting excursions.

Monet’s L’Ancienne rue de la Chaussee is a softly modulated interpretation of this quaint and historic street; a luminous, late afternoon study of light and shadows as they play against the folding and unfolding planar aspects of facades and roofs of the buildings lining the street. The composition is built upon an open, virtually unbounded base foreground, the lines of which are of a severe convergent triangulation aided by well-orchestrated effects of light and shadow that inexorably carry the eye to the narrow confines of rue de la Chaussée near the center of the picture plane. Yet it is the light-hued warm tints ranging from soft pinks to mauves that lift the shifting planar elements of the architecture to a setting of extreme beauty, aided by the formal accents of phthalo blues and greens evident in the clothing and window shutters — a splendid painting that foretells of so much to come.

Coup de vent, created in 1881, shows a more assured painter. Painted from the Normandy coast, where gusts of wind race through town ten months of the year, the title Coup de vent (“Gust of wind“) shares that Monet painted this scene on yet another blustery day. Seeing the easterly sway and lean of these windswept trees, it is no surprise that the wind almost always sweeps through this region from the west.

Monet completed four canvases during this particular trip to Normandy: a singular scene painted from the beach at Sainte-Adresse and three pictures looking seaward from the bluffs above Trouville. Today, Coup de vent is the only one of these four works that remains in private hands.

Trouville is where Eugene Boudin and Johan Jongkind introduced Monet to landscape painting en plein air (or painting in the open air), and Monet had stayed here with his late-wife Camille and their young son Jean just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. So, the second anniversary of Camille’s death on 5 September likely preoccupied Monet while painting Coup de vent, as the piece was executed in late August or early September. The painting provides a beautiful tension between the effervescent light and colors and the blustery winds amongst the tilting trees, a reflection of Monet’s ties to the location and his history. The piece becomes more than a landscape.

Monet’s dealer Durand-Ruel bought Coup de vent from Monet in 1883 and it was subsequently sold to the American Harris Whittemore collector in 1891. Whittemore, a close friend of Mary Cassat, would go on to develop an important collection of Impressionist masterpieces. The provenance speaks to the important nature of the work, lending even more storied history to the piece.

Separated by almost ten years, these two pieces showcase the development of Monet, the importance of collaboration and the influence of his personal history on his work. More than a technical master, Monet’s paintings reflect his life, the joviality of friendship and the complexity of life well lived