Claude Monet

Bouquet of Flowers, 1891

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City
(click image to enlarge)

The sunflowers harvested for this lush bouquet grew flanking the steps led down to Monet's garden at Vetheuil.  He exhibited this painting in 1882 at the seventh Impressionist exhibition, where the "brio and daring" of his technique elicited the critics' admiration.

Vincent van Gogh probably saw Monet's Sunflowers in Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery when he arrived in Paris in early 1886.  In a letter to his brother, Theo, in November 1888, Van Gogh recalled Monet's work in relation to his own "Sunflowers" series: "Gauguin was telling me the other day that he had seen a picture by
Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, very fine, but--he likes mine better. I don't agree."(click image to enlarge)

Claude Monet

Ice Floes, 1893

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

The prolonged freeze and heavy snowfalls in the winter of 1892-93 inspired Monet to capture their effects on the Seine in a series of paintings for which he chose a vantage point not far from his home in Giverny.  The river had frozen in mid-January but began to thaw on the 23rd; the following day, in a letter to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, Monet lamented that "the thaw came too soon for me...the results--just four or five canvases and they are far from complete." By the end of  February, however, he finished more than a dozen paintings, including this view of the melting ice floes.

Claude Monet

The Valley of The Nervia,1884

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

Monet Painted "The Valley of the Nervia" during a ten-week trip to the Italian Riviera in early 1884.  The river Nervia flows into the Mediterranean near the French-Italian border between Ventimiglia and Bordighera.  The Maritime Alps are visible in the background behind the village of Camporosso.  In this painting Monet employs the lighter, brighter palette that he first adopted after a trip to the Riviera in 1883.

Claude Monet

Palm Trees at Bordighera, 1884

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

This canvas, like "The Valley of the Nervia", was painted during Monet's trip to the Italian Riviera in Early 1884.  The view looks to the west across the Bay of Ventimiglia and toward the Maritime Alps on the Italian-French border.  Monet who had first visited the Riviera with Renoir in December 1883 decided to return alone on his second trip from mid-January to early April 1884; he later wrote Renoir that he felt working
"at deux" was aways a mistake.

Claude Monet

Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), 1903-04

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

In the fall of 1899 and the early months of 1900 and of 1901, Monet executed a series of views of the Thames River in London.  From his room at the Savoy Hotel, he painted Waterloo Bridge to the east, and Charing Cross Bridge to the west; beginning in February 1900, he set up his easel on a terrace at Staint Thomas's Hospital across the river, reserving time in the late afternoon to depict the Houses of Parliament. 

While in London, Monet produced nearly a hundred canvases, reportedly moving from one to another as the light changed.  He continued to work on these paintings in his studio at Giverny.  In May 1904, thirty-seven
were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, including this view of the Houses of Parliament cloaked in dense fog.

Claude Monet

Rouen Cathedral, The Portal (Sunlight), 1894

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

In 1892-93 Monet painted more than thirty views of Rouen Cathedral.Moving from one canvas to another as the day progressed, he painted the facade with highly textured brush-strokes that convey the aspects of
sculpted stone and also make the atmosphere and light palpable. The series records not only the cathedral's appearance at different times but also the artist's subjective experience of light and atmosphere. He
finished the works in his studio at Giverny,carefully adjusting the canvases both independently and in relations to one another.

In 1895 Monet exhibited twenty cathedral paintings at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris.  This one was entitled Le Portail (Soleil).

Claude Monet

Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), 1891

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City
(click image to enlarge)

Between summer 1890 and winder 1891 Monet executed about thirty paintings of the haystacks in a field near his house at Giverny.  In the midst of this effort, he wrote to the critic Gustave Geoffroy:
I am working very hard, struggling with a series of different effects (haystacks), but at this season the sun sets so fast I cannot follow it...The more I continue, the more I see that a great deal of work is necessary in order to succeed in rendering what I seek."  Although Monet had painted multiple versions of a single subject earlier, Haystacks was the first group that he exhibited as a series; in 1891, fifteen were shown at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris.

Claude Monet

The Four Trees, 1891

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

Monet settled in Giverny, about forty-five miles northwest of Paris, in 1883.  Although he took frequent trips, venturing as far as London and Venice, it was the landscape within a two-mile radius of his home that captured his attention for the rest of his life.  With his famous "Haystacks" pictures, begun in 1890,
Monet began to paint in series, often working on serveral canvases at once in order to capture the scene in changing light and weatherconditions.

During the summer and fall of 1891, he painted a series of canvases depicting the poplars along the Epte River, about a mile from his house.  Because he did not paint the poplars from the opposite bank but instead from a boat in the middle of the river, we cannot see the tops of the four trees nearest us--only the vertical lines of their slender trunks.  Furthermore, were it not for the horizontal of the riverbank, the tree trunks would be indistinguishable from their relection in the water.

Claude Monet

Water Lilies

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

As part of his extensive gardening plans at Giverny, Monet had a pond dug and planted with lilies in 1893.  He Painted the subject in 1899, and thereafter it dominated his art.  He worked continuously for more than twenty years on a large-scale decorative series, attempting to capture every observation, impression, and reflection of the flowers and water.  By the mid-1910s Monet had achieved a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost
abstract art.  This work, which he began in the late teens and kept in his studio until his death, is one of the most common pictures of the late series.

Claude Monet

Water Lilies, 1919

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

Monet left much of his late work unfinished and released few paintings for sale, reporting that he was not yet satisfied and was still working on them "with passion."  This canvas is one of four water-lily pictures that, quite exceptionally, he did complete, sign, andsell in 1919.

Claude Monet

The Path through the Irises, 1914-17

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

Irises, among Monet's favorite flowers, lined the pathways leading up to the house and Japanese bridge on the artist's property at Giverny.  This bird's eye view of a garden path belongs to a series of monumental works painted during the First World War that capture the vital essence of these vivacious flowers with an intensity
and breadth of vision that bear witness to Monet's genius and determination.  Late in life, as his eyesight faltered, he dispensed with subtlety and "took in the motif in large masses," waiting "until the idea took shape, until the arrangement and composition inscribed themselves on the brain."

Claude Monet

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, 1873

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

(click image to enlarge)

Monet's art depends on obersation of his environment, and to that extent it is always autobiographical.  In his pictures, one can chart the seasons,the weather, or as here, the look of women's fashion in 1873.  Monet's wife, Camille Doncieux, is as easily recognizable as are the mounds of geraniums in the garden of the couple's rented house in Argenteuil.

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench is the most enigmatic of Monet's rare genre pictures.  Numerous interpretations have been offered, yet nothing has been found in the literature or theater of Monet' time
that corresponds to this scene.  The most teling clue may be biographical:the death of Camille's father in September 1873. Camille was an impassive model, but here she telegraphs sadness, while holding a note in
her goved hand.  Later, Monet identified the gentlman as a neighbor--perhaps one who had called to offer his condolences and a consoling bouquet.

Claude Monet

The Stroller 1887 (Suzanne Hoschede),

Later Mrs.Theodore Earl Butler

This view of Suzanne Hoschede in the meadows just south of Le Pressoir, Monet's home at Giverny, was probably painted in the summer of 1887.  She became Monet's preferred model in the period
after the death of his first wife, Camille, in 1879, and before 1890, when he gave up plein-air figure painting.  The model was the daughter of Alice Hoschede, whom Monet married in 1892.

Claude Monet

Poppy Fields near Argenteuil, 1875

Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC
(click image to enlarge)

This work is one of four similar views of the plain of Gennevilliers, just southeast of Argenteuil, which Monet executed in summer 1875.  He first painted the subject two years earlier in the celebrated Poppies near Argenteuil (Musee d'Orsay, Paris).

Claude Monet

Jean Monet on his Hobby, 1872 - Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Claude Monet

Bouquet of Sunflowers, 1881 - Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Claude Monet

Regatta at Sainte Adresse  1867

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

Claude Monet

Vetheuil in Summer, 1880  - Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Claude Monet

Spring (Fruit Trees in Bloom) 1873  Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Claude Monet

Landscape: The Parc Monceau, 1876

                                                    Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City