Lesson #5

Claude Monet (mow-NAY)

French, 1840-1926

The Cliff at Fécamp, 1881

Oil on canvas

Subject

This cliff painting is one of a series created at Grainval, just south of Fécamp on the Normandy coast. It reflects the artist’s philosophy that “landscape is nothing but an impression ‑ an instantaneous one.” Monet waited and watched the shifting sun and shadows and then quickly brushed in the moment he wanted. He liked to paint the same scene many times so he could study the effects of changing light and weather. Children frequently trailed the artist and carried his canvases.

Style

The writer Guy de Maupassant also followed Monet in his quest for impressions and vividly described the artist’s gifts: “He would pick up with a few strokes of his brush the falling sun ray or the passing cloud, leaving aside the false and conventional. I saw him seize a sparkling downpour of light on the white cliff and fix it in a shower of yellow tones which made the effect of this fleeting and blinding marvel seem strangely astonishing.” This painting is Monet’s reaction to a brisk spring day at Fécamp, as the breeze ruffles the sea, and clouds tumble by in a luminous sky. Like a true Impressionist, he has applied brushstrokes of brilliant blue, green, and yellow in contrasting patterns. Some viewers can see animal-like shapes in the rocks of The Cliff at Fécamp ‑ perhaps the only sign of life in a scene that is without human evidence. The swirling ambiguity of cliffs and sea is dizzying and adds to the sense that we are there. Notice the off-center composition of the cliffs against the sea. Like other Impressionists, Monet was probably influenced by the asymmetrical compositions of popular Japanese wood-block prints.

Artist

Technological advances ‑ portable easels and metal tubes that stored paint indefinitely ‑ allowed Impressionists like Monet to take extended painting trips outdoors. A wide range of pigments was also available, though Monet used a small, typical Impressionist palette of eight to ten colors. “The real point,” he wrote a friend, “is to know how to use the colors.” Despite failing eyesight, the artist painted well into his eighties. The public discovered his work by 1890, and his fortunes quickly improved. By 1920, the painter who once had struggled to feed and clothe his family complained about the “too-frequent visits from buyers who often disturb and bore me.”

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 958