Monet speech

 Claude Monet & Impressionism

What is impressionism? Impressionist paintings have a heavy emphasis on color and light. They are often comprised of ordinary subject matter and use visible brush strokes.  It is often described as “painting light”. The pioneers of this style of painting made their art by focusing on colors as opposed to using extreme detail of objects, which its predecessor realism was known for. Impressionists painted their first general impression of a scene or object, which would include techniques like broken color and rapid brush strokes. Broken color technique re-created the actual sensation of light by allowing strokes of color to remain separate instead of blending them. Detail was often not a priority-- In other words, the Impressionists broke the rules of traditional detail-oriented art known as realism. The critic Louis Leroy, in attempt to attack Claude Monet’s Impression-Sunrise painting, said that the painting looked like an impression in that it was like an unfinished sketch. He went on to say, “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape!” The name, though it was intended an insult, stuck.

The Academie des Beaux-Arts was considered the authority on French realist painting at the time. They had very high standards and didn’t approve of the up-and-coming impressionist generation. The Academie’s exhibits were held at the Salon de Paris, and if painters could get their work accepted, it would mean their big break. But year after year, even as Impressionism was becoming more widely accepted, the Salon refused to accept paintings by who are now well-known and admired impressionists. Emperor Napoleon III was responsible for creating an exhibition called Salon of the Refused, or Salon des Refusees, which featured works of artists who had been rejected by the Academie. This was after the famous painter Edouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” was rejected in 1863, causing the disbelief of his many admirers.

The Impressionist movement formally began in 1874 when a group of French artists including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro held an exhibit at the studio of well-known photographer and journalist Felix Nadar. These were the same struggling artists whose works had been rejected numerous times by the Academie.

            Claude Monet is considered to be a founder of impressionist painting. He was born in Paris and shortly after his birth his family relocated to Le Havre, France. His father was a grocer who encouraged him to get into the family grocery business but Claude was not interested. His mother was a singer who was very supportive of his passion for drawing. At the age of fifteen, Monet had already become well-known locally for his pastel and charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for small amounts of francs.

            When Monet was eighteen he met Eugene Boudin. Boudin was a local landscape painter who became a major influence on Monet, showing him oil paints and teaching him techniques for “en plein air”, or outdoor painting. What he learned from Boudin would later become what he is most famous for now.

            Monet studied traditional art at the Acedemie Suisse in Paris, and later became a student of Charles Gleyre. It was at Gleyre's studio that he met and befriended other impressionists Pierre-August Renoir and Alfred Sisley. The friends often painted together and exchanged new ideas. Monet was becoming increasingly interested in natural light, color, and atmosphere.

           From 1870 to 1876 Monet lived in Argenteuil, France with his wife Camille and their two sons. In Argenteuil, he created many of his most famous paintings including Impression-Sunrise. After the death of his wife in 1879, he spent years devoting his time to several series of paintings, the first of which was a series of haystacks. Monet would paint the same subject over and over, each time capturing a different lighting and weather condition. By the end of his life, he was going blind-- but this did not stop him from painting. In the last years of his life he worked on his famous water lily paintings – a series of the many water lilies he saw in the gardens of his home in Giverny, France. He painted these on large mural-sized canvases and worked on them in his studio until his death in 1926. The water lily paintings were given to the state and can be found at Musee de l'Orangerie, an impressionist museum in Paris.