Claude Monet: Haystacks

Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1890-91,Oil on canvas, 60 x 100 

The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impression in front of the most fugitive effects.

Claude Monet

Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise
1865, oil on canvas, 30 x 60 cm 
San Diego Museum of Art

Monet receives his first commission aged just 17, some of his drawings are displayed in the local art shop in La Harve along side the artist Eugene Boudin (1824-1892). The two artist inevitable meet and strike a lifetime friendship. I personally think this chance meeting is the root of impressionism, for it is Eugene that introduces Monet to pein-air (open air) landscape painting; Which was for many years to come frowned upon by the establishment.

 After going out to paint with Boudin, Monet was totally converted to plain-air and became seriousness rather than casual approach to art. He declaims to his family, I'm going to be an artist.

Impressionist

Monet moves to Paris and enrolls at the Academies Suisse, where he first meets Camille Pissarro. the two artist are to become the founding figures of Impressionism. Unfortunately the embryonic state was delayed by the Algerian war. After a year as a soldier Monet contracts typhoid and his aunt requisitions him out of the army.

In November 1862 Monet goes back to Paris to study art with the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre.

While their Claude Oscar Monet drops the Oscar from his name, from now on he sign his paintings " Claude Monet".

While at the academy Monet meets three kindred spirits;- Frederic Bazille (1841-70), Alfred Sisley (1839-99) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Over the next four years their aims and style crystallizes into what we now call Impressionist. Monet even in those early days emerged as the lordly leader of Impressionism.

January 1865 Monet and Bazille move into a flat on the Rue Furstenlerd. Monet finishes  " The Mouth of the Seine at Hornfleur" and "The Point  de la H'eve at Low Tide".  They are both excepted  into the Paris Salon. In the same exhibition the similar named Manet was being criticized for his evolutionary "Olympia" as a moral and artist outrage. Monet is so inspired by Manet at the same time want's to be favorably compared. He decides to paint "Dejeuner sur Le Herbe" to compete but abandons the painting unfinished.

Early 1867 Monet broke as ever, returns to Paris and stays with the more affluent Bazille, who is also supporting Renoir in his flat. Monet and Renoir become close friends and go about Paris painting together. At this time having been once again rejected by the Saloon the artist friends contemplate an independent exhibition of there own work, but funds as usual were short.

In 1867 Monet's partner and model Camille had their child Jean, Bazille become godfather. Monet had difficulty with the responsibilities of fatherhood continued to live with his Aunt until after the birth.

In 1868 the family moved to Bennecourt on the river Seine, not far from Giverny where some 15 years later Monet settles for the rest of his long life. Upon arrival at Bennecuort Monet paints what is tentatively the first impressionist painting "The Seine at Bennecourt".

Renoir and Monet made a habit of going out to paint together in the 1860's, developing the impressionist style with pure colour put side by side rather than mixed on the palette, plus the use of different colour in the shadows than had previously been used. They were followed in concurrently by Sisley and Pissarro, practicing similar techniques. Exchanging ideas with each other at regular meetings at the Cafe Guerbois. These four joined the Lordly Manet at his reserved table., other included Degas, Cézanne, Bethe Morisot and Bazille.

In 1870 Monet and his family along with fellow painters move to London to avoid the Prussian invasion and siege of Paris in September. It was while in London  that Pissarro introduced Monet to Durand-Ruel who was fast becoming an international Art dealer. Also while in London the artist visited the National Gallery to view such past masters as Turner and Constable.

Not long after Monet’s return to France he visited Le Harve and painted the picture titled Impression: Sunset, which was hang in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, at which a journalist coined the term Impressionist. All the painters of this style were poor around this time for the paintings were not popular because of the bad press, but within the next decade things slowly improve and Monet could afford to buy his now famous house in Giverny. Here he employed six gardeners to make his Japanese water garden and paint his series of water lily and Japanese bridge paintings

Died: Monet was partially blind towards the end of his life, to paint he would have his stepdaughter hand him the colours. He contracted cancer and on the 5 th December 1926 passed away