Claude Monet

Rouen Cathedral, The Portal (Sunlight), 1894

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Paris Rediscovers Monet’s Magic at Grand Palais

 Many of Monet's work in one place:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/arts/design/05monet.html?scp=2&sq=claude%20monet%20%20&st=cse

Claude Monet

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/07/arts/review-art-monet-s-complexity-and-grandeur-in-his-series-paintings.html?pagewanted=1

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
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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).

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

Olive Trees- 1889

(click image to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Upon Van Gogh's arrival at the asylum of Saint-Remy in spring of 1889, the olive trees that grew in cultivated groves near the walls of the sanitarium took on great significance for him.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The Daughters of Catalle Mendes, Huguette 1888

(click image to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Hopng to recapture the success he had achieved with "Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children" (on view in an adjacent gallery) at the Salon of 1879, Renoir asked his friend Catulle Medes for permissionion to paint his three daughters, Mendes was a well-known writer and publisher of Symbolist poetry\;his companion, Augusta Holmes, a virtuoso pianist and composer, was the mother of these girls.

Renoir sent the portrait to a group exhibition in 1888 that was a critical disater; the painting was ignored again at the 1890 Salon.  It has since emerged, however, as one of Renoir's most impressive works, realized in this new, aggressive coloristic style.  In the fluid brushwork and treatment of theme, the portrait pays homage to
Fragonard and other eighteenth-century genre painters.

MET News - October

http://www.metmuseum.org/events/

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

Self-Portrait with  a Straw Hat (1887)

(click image to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

In 1886, at age thirty-two, Van Gogh arrived in Paris "not even know[ing] what the Impressionist were. "By the time he left, two years later, he had cast off the muddy palette and coarse brushwork that had characterized his earlier efforts and embraced the latest developments in painting.  Here he demonstrates his awareness of Neo-Impressionist technique and color theory, using the back of a Dutch peasant study he had taken with him to Paris.

  Van Gogh produced more than twenty self portraits during Prisian sojourn, Short of funds but determined nevertheless to hone his skills as a figure painter, he became his own best sitter.  "I deliberately bought a good mirror so if I lacked a model I could work from my own likeness."

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

Irises 1890

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Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Upon his arrival at the asylum n Saint-Remy in May 1890, Van Gogh painted views of the institutions' overgrown garden. He ignored still-life subjects during his yearlong hospital say, but before leaving the artist brought his work in Saint-Remy full circle with four lush bouquets of spring flowers: two of roses and two of irises, in contrasting formats and color harmonies. Van Gogh noted that in the "two canvases representing big bunches of violet irises, "he placed" one lot against a pink background" and the other "against a startling citron yellow background" to exploit the play of "disparate complementarity.  "Owing to the use of afugitive red pigment, the "soft and harmonious" effect that he had sought in the Metropolitan painting through the "combination of greens, pinks, violets" has been altered by the fadingof the once pink background to almost white.  Another still life from the series, an upright composition of roses, is on this blog.  Both were owned by he artist's mother, who kept them until her death in 1907.

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

First Steps, after Millet, 1890

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Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

In fall and winter 1889-90, while a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Remy, Van Gogh painted twenty-one copies after Millet, an artist he greatly admired.  He considered his copies "improvisations" or
"translations" akin to a musician's interpretation of a composer's work. He let the black-and-white images--whether prints, reproductions, or, as her, a photograph that his brother, Theo, had sent-- "pose as subject"
then "improvised color on it.  "For this work of January 1890, Van Gogh squared-up a photograph
of Millet's First Steps and transferred it to the canvas.

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

Sunflowers 1887

(click image to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Sunflowers appear amid the variegated bouquets that were the the mainstay of Van Gogh's work in Paris in 1886-88.  Intent upon updating his lackluster Dutch palette, he repeatedly turned to "painting flowers" so as "to render intense color and not a gray harmony."  By the summer of 1887, when he adopted the sunflower as the dominant motif in four pictures, he had found his voice as an original colorist.  Apparently conceived in
sequence, this group comprises a preparatory oil sketch for the Metropolitan's canvas (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam); and a larger composition that sets forth a composite image of the two pairs of (Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo).  Paul gauguin acquired the two smaller canvases, and until the mid -1890s, when he sold his most prized possessions to finance his South Seas voyage, they held pride of place above the bed in his Paris apartment.

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

L'Arlesieme: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux(1888-1889)

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

Marie Ginoux was the proprietress of the Cafe de la Gare, Where Van Gogh lived in Arles between May and September 1888, before he moved into nearby Yellow House.  In early November,wearing the
regional costume of the legendary dark-haired beauties of Arles, she posed for both Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh was thrilled to "have an Arlesienne at last" and quickly "slashed on in an hour" his first, more summarily executed version of this portrait (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), using the thick jute canvas that Gauguin had brought with him to Arles.  Later Van Gogh enhanced that image by adorning the tabletop
with two accessories befitting an Arlesienne: a paraso and gloves.  Those finishing touches were probably added in December 1888 or January 1889, when he revisited the composition to use it as the prototype for Museum"s painting.  Relying on more saturated and richly applied colors to add substance to the of his sitter, and showing her seated at a table with books, Van Gogh made this more compelling portrait of his friend--which he gave to her.

Van Gogh - Metropolitan Museum of Art , NYC

Cypresses, 1889 (click image to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

"Cypresses" was painted in late June 1889, shortly after Van Gogh began his year long voluntary stay as a patient in the asylum in Saint-Remy.  The subject, which he found "as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk, both captivated and challenged the artist: "It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine."  Van Gogh's initial fascination with cypresses resulted in these paintings" two showing the "big and massive trees" at close range, in vertical format (this and one in the Kroller-Muller Museum, Orrerlo), and a majestic horizontal view "Wheat Field with Cypresses", Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.