Claude Monet painted for sixty years and spent almost all of it on one problem: light changes, and paint does not. Everything else, the harbours and haystacks and cathedrals and lily ponds, is him attacking that problem from a different angle.
He is the most reproduced painter in the world, which is a strange fate for someone who was broke into his forties and openly mocked in the Paris press. This guide walks the whole arc, from a foggy harbour at Le Havre to the last enormous lily paintings he made half blind. Every piece mentioned is in our Claude Monet collection.
The Painting That Named a Movement
Impression, Sunrise (1872) shows the harbour at Le Havre before the fog lifts. It took very little time to paint and it looks it, which was the complaint.
When it was shown in 1874 at the first exhibition of the group that would become the Impressionists, the critic Louis Leroy wrote a sneering review built around the title. Wallpaper in its early stages, he said, is more finished than this seascape. He called the show a display of Impressionists, meaning it as a joke. The painters kept the word.
There is a technical reason the picture works, and it is worth knowing before you hang one. The orange sun and the grey-blue sky are almost identical in brightness. Only the color separates them. Photograph it in black and white and the sun nearly disappears. That near-equal brightness is what makes it shimmer to the eye, and it is also why this painting needs decent light on the wall to do its trick.
La Grenouillere: Where It Was Actually Invented
Three years before Impression, Sunrise, Monet and Renoir spent a summer at a floating bathing and drinking establishment on the Seine called La Grenouillere, the frog pond. They set up next to each other and painted the same scene.
La Grenouillere (1869) and Bathers at La Grenouillere (1869) are where the whole method arrives. The water is not painted as water. It is painted as a set of separate horizontal dashes, dark, light, blue, white, laid next to each other and left alone. Stand close and it is a mess of strokes. Stand back and it is unmistakably moving water in bright sun.
Monet was so poor that summer that he wrote to a friend saying the family had no bread and no fire. The paintings do not show a trace of it. That gap between the life and the pictures runs through his whole career and is part of why the work has lasted: he was not painting his mood, he was painting the light in front of him.
The same loosening was happening in Japanese woodblock prints that were arriving in Paris at exactly this time, and Monet collected them obsessively. Our Hokusai piece covers that side of the story.
Argenteuil: The Happy Years
Monet moved to Argenteuil on the Seine outside Paris in 1871 and stayed until 1878. It is the stretch where everything works: he has a house, a garden, a boat rigged as a floating studio, and friends coming out from the city to paint with him.
Monet's Garden at Argenteuil (1873) is one of the best loved pictures of the period, and it makes a point worth noticing. Monet did not find these gardens. He made them. He was a serious gardener before he was a rich one, and the flower beds are a deliberate arrangement of color that he then went outside and painted.
The Artist's House at Argenteuil (1873) and La Seine A Argenteuil (1873) fill in the rest of the world he built there, house and river, indoors and out.
Train in the Snow at Argenteuil (1875) is the corrective to the idea of Monet as a painter of pretty gardens. It is cold, industrial and grey, and he is clearly delighted by the smoke, because smoke is another way of painting air.
Woman with a Parasol (1875) is his wife Camille and their son Jean, painted from below so they stand against nothing but sky. Her face is a few strokes and no features. He is painting a figure in wind and glare, and the veil blowing across her is the actual subject.
The Red Kerchief (1873) is Camille again, seen through a window from inside a warm room while she passes outside in the snow. Monet kept it until he died. It is the most personal painting in this collection by some distance.
Camille died in 1879, aged thirty-two. Monet painted her on her deathbed and afterwards wrote, with some horror at himself, that he had caught himself analysing the colours the light was putting on her face. It is the most honest thing anyone has ever said about being a painter.
The Vetheuil pictures, Vetheuil (1879) and The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil (1880), come from the hard years immediately after.
The Series: One Subject, Many Lights
In the 1890s Monet stopped painting subjects and started painting conditions. He would take one motif and work it over and over at different hours, in different weather, on canvases he rotated as the light shifted.
Rouen Cathedral, Sunlight (1894) comes from about thirty canvases of the same facade. The building is a pretext. The subject is what the air between him and the stone was doing that morning, and the cathedral is simply the thing that holds still while the light moves.
London Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1904) was painted from a window at St Thomas' Hospital across the Thames. He loved London specifically for its filthy air, on the grounds that fog is what gives a city its mass and mystery.
The coast pictures work the same way. The Cliffs at Etretat (1885), Rough Sea at Etretat (1868-1869) and Rocks At Port Goulphar, Belle Ile (1886) are the same handful of rocks under completely different skies.
Cliff Walk At Pourville (1882) and The Church at Varengeville (1882) come from the Normandy coast in the same period, and Grand Canal, Venice (1908) shows what he did with a city built on water when he finally got to one.
The warm south is here too. Bordighera (1884) and Gardener's House at Antibes (1888) are Mediterranean pictures, and the palette goes almost violent compared with the Normandy greys.
Giverny and the Water Lilies
Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and bought the property in 1890, once the money finally arrived. He diverted a stream, dug a pond, planted it, and had a Japanese style bridge built over it. Local farmers objected that his foreign plants would poison the water.
Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies (1899) and Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies, Harmony in Green (1899) are from the first great run. The bridge still gives you a horizon and a structure to hold onto.
Then he took the horizon away. Water Lilies (1907), Water Lilies (1915) and Water Lilies (1919) are pure surface. No bank, no sky except as reflection, no sense of where you are standing. You are looking straight down into water that also contains clouds.
The late ones were painted through cataracts. By 1922 his vision had degraded so far that he was choosing paint by reading the labels on the tubes. He had surgery in 1923 and repainted parts of canvases he had finished while half blind.
The Artist's Garden at Giverny (Irises) (1900) and Poppy Field Giverny (1885) are the dry-land Giverny pictures, and Spring Flowers (1864) is a rare early still life from long before any of it.
He gave the enormous late panels to France. They were installed at the Orangerie in Paris the year after his death, in two oval rooms designed so the paintings wrap around the viewer with no corners to break them. It is the closest thing painting has to an immersive room, and he planned it decades in advance.
Monet died at Giverny in 1926, aged eighty-six, having outlived nearly every painter he started with. Van Gogh, who admired him, had been dead thirty-six years; our Van Gogh piece covers that far shorter career.
How to Hang a Monet
Bright rooms: the gardens and the water lilies. They were painted outdoors in full light and they want it back. A lily painting on a dim wall turns into a green smudge, because the color relationships that carry it need light to separate.
Dim or north-facing rooms: the London fog pictures and Train in the Snow. They were painted in bad light and they hold their structure in it.
Above a sofa or a bed: a horizontal water lily canvas at large or estate size. There is no focal point to be cut off by a cushion or a headboard, which is the usual problem with hanging art low.
As a series, which is the most Monet way to buy: two or three of one motif in matching frames. The two Japanese Bridge canvases from 1899 work perfectly as a pair. So do any two Etretat coast pictures. Hanging them together is the whole point of how he worked.
On frames: gold suits the gardens, the figures and anything warm. Dark bronze suits the snow, the trains and the London smoke. Silver is right for the sea and the cliffs, where the light is cold to begin with.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Monet paint the same thing over and over?
Because the subject was never the point. From about 1890 he worked in series precisely so the differences between canvases would show what the light was doing. One Rouen Cathedral is a picture of a church. Five of them together are a picture of time passing, which is what he was actually after.
Which Monet should I buy first?
If the room is bright, a garden or a water lily painting. If it is dim, the London or snow pictures, which were built for low light. If you want the one that carries the most history, Impression, Sunrise is the painting the entire movement is named after.
How are your prints made?
Each is printed to order on archival canvas from a high resolution scan, stretched over an Appalachian Poplar stretcher bar, and finished in an ornate resin frame in gold, silver or dark bronze. The workshop photographs in this piece are our own benches. Nothing is warehoused, so your piece is made after you order it.
