CHAPTER V · CLAUDE MONET
“SÛREMENT CET HOMME A VÉCU, ET LE DÉMON DE L’ART HABITE EN LUI”
GUSTAVE GEFFROY
CLAUDE MONET is one of the few fortunate painters whose fame is not posthumous, and whose material recompense runs parallel with the merit of their production. He, above all others, has lifted the School of Impressionism in France from the derision and disrepute which greeted its inception some thirty years ago, and to him is due the honour of making it one of the most prominent of latter-day art movements.
The present generation witnesses the triumph of a remarkable revolution, and the success of a group of painters, of which Monet was head, after years of acrimonious struggle against a world of prejudice and disdain. Claiming a right to exercise their art as they thought fit, aided by a mere handful of far-sighted critics and patrons, for thirty years they patiently endured public obloquy. Now the Luxembourg Gallery enlarges its space to receive their works, and before long they will be represented side by side with the masters of the Louvre. Appreciation is the order of the day, and millionaires compete for their canvases.
The life-history of Claude Monet is inseparably connected with the story of Impressionism in France. As a leader of the little group any record of the subject must largely consider his part in the result. It is remarkable that a man of such talent should remain comparatively unknown in England, considering that another portion of the Anglo-Saxon world has always generously encouraged him. For the past twenty years a large proportion of his works has gone to the United States. The English nation will have to pay dearly in the future for its present neglect of modern French art. At the present moment there is not a single specimen of the work of Monet on exhibition in any English public art gallery.
Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840. Son of a wealthy merchant of Havre, his inclinations towards art were soon shown, and these tendencies, as usual, discouraged at home. No member of the family had any artistic gifts, and, as in the case of Edouard Manet, the youth was sent on a foreign tour. His school work was spasmodic and irregular, and he devoted much of his time at Havre to caricature and the company of Boudin the painter. When remonstrated with his reply was the historic, “I would like to paint as a bird sings.”
After two years of military service with the Chasseurs d’Afrique in Algeria, Monet caught fever, and returned home. He then entered the Atélier Gleyre, and remained in Paris. Of personal history there is little to relate. He is a man of high purpose, greatly talented, excessively active and self-reliant, who has not faltered once from the path of his ideals. His adventures have been those usual to the profession of a landscape-painter. He has suffered from fever and rheumatism, the results of working near mosquito-haunted marshes, in drenching rain, or in damp grass. The occupation is peaceful enough, the diseases named are of everyday occurrence, yet they exert a powerful influence upon the life of a man for ever engaged with brain and eye, with nerves strung to the most intense pitch.
His early struggles were the ordinary struggles of nine-tenths of those votaries who worship at the shrines of Art. Claude Monet has drunk deeply of the bitterness of life. He has endured privations and disappointments which have brought him almost to the depths of despair. He has survived only through his indomitable pluck.
“One must have the strength for such a fight,” says Monet, with the assurance born of experience, when recounting the history of those troublous days. He is fortunately most generously endowed with the attributes peculiar to the true artistic temperament—those exquisite dreams and reveries which are at once a solace, a pleasure, and a sustaining impetus. Truly was Baudelaire justified in writing: “Nations have great men in spite of themselves, and so have families. They do their best not to have any, so that the great man, in order to exist, must needs possess a power of attack greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of individuals.”
It has long been granted, even by the bitterest of his opponents, that Monet possesses a few at least of the attributes of genius—the capacity for turning out large quantities of work, an almost unparalleled fertility of invention, imagination, and originality, and above all that priceless gift to the artist—the supreme power of creation. Moreover, he is ever keen and restless in search of the new and unexplored, for ever mistrusting the value of his own productions.
CLAUDE MONET
A STUDY · CLAUDE MONET
Never has he been influenced strongly enough to waver in the pursuit of his ideals, either through the gibes of the critics or the lack of appreciation on the part of the public.
His work is large and simple in character; his colour vigorous to the utmost capacity of the prismatic tints, bearing the impress of a passionate, violent, and highly sensitive artistic individuality.
Monet is a lyrical poet, singing the joy of life and nature. The decadence of modern France in literary circles finds no reflection on his canvas. Strongly opposed by personal temperament to the ugly and morbid, he allows his brush to touch no subject at all allied to such themes. In every picture he paints we seem to hear Pippa singing:
“The year’s at the Spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in His heaven
All’s right with the world!”
A happy serenity is his great charm, and it has been arrived at by temperament, not by training.
At the beginning of the Impressionist movement the nightly meetings at the Café Guerbois became the centre of a small band of innovators and iconoclasts, attracted by the sympathy of a common aim, the necessity of mutual encouragement, and the prescience of the evolution of a new idea.
The first public exhibition of the works of these painters was held in the spring of 1874 at Nadar’s, in the Boulevard des Capucines. It created an uproar in the art world, which culminated in several scenes of personal violence between over-excited critics. Other exhibitions, chiefly devoted to the works of Claude Monet, may be roughly summarised as follows: one in 1876; at the galleries of M. Durand-Ruel in 1877; in 1880 at the offices of “La Vie Moderne,” Boulevard des Italiens; in 1889 in conjunction with Rodin at the gallery of M. Georges Petit.
Monet exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865. The two marine pieces drew from Edouard Manet the remark, “Who is this Monet, who looks as if he had taken my name, and happens thus to profit by the noise I make?” He exhibited for the last time in 1880. In 1882 he forwarded Glaçons sur la Seine, a remarkably beautiful conception of an illusory effect, the rejection of which finally ended all relations between the artist and a too conservative body.
With the exception of a semi-private show at Dowdeswell’s of Bond Street in 1883, Monet made his début in England at the Winter Exhibition of 1888 of the Royal Society of British Artists, then under the presidency of Mr. Whistler. That careful critic, Mr. H. M. Spielman, of the “Magazine of Art,” wrote the following lines in his journal: “He who contemplates these distinctive pieces of arch-impressionism, without prejudice, without ‘arrière pensée,’ must own that for strength and brilliancy of general tone and for decorative effect, they have few, if any, equals.”
Monet has never been seen at his best in England; indeed, the same may be said of all the members of the Impressionist group. Owing to the ready market for their work in France and America, it is rarely that the dealers are able to attract across the Channel any but second-rate canvases. Isolated works have been shown at the Boussod Vallodon galleries, the New English Art Club, the International Society’s Exhibition at Knightsbridge, and a miscellaneous collection on view at the Hanover Gallery, Bond Street, in 1901. The standard of the latter was not high, and the result disappointing to all parties. A representative exhibition remains to be held.
No other country but France can boast of landscape so varied, so picturesque, and so atmospherically suited to the Impressionist. The principal scenes of Monet’s labours have been Havre, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the Riviera, La Creuse, La Manche, with Giverny and the Seine valley in particular. Short visits have been devoted to England, Norway, and Holland; but the first-named localities have seen the production of the famous series known under the titles of Les Meules, Peupliers au bord de l’Epté, Glaçons sur la Seine, Matins sur la Seine, A Argenteuil, Belle Isle, Bordighera, Antibes, Champs des Tulipes, and Les Cathédrales. There is also a series of paintings of the artist’s Japanese water-garden at Giverny, and yet another series dealing with London under different atmospheric aspects.
Claude Monet is enthusiastically in love with London from the painter’s point of view. From the balconies of the Savoy Hotel the French master has watched the tidal ebb and flow of the great grey river, with its squalid southern banks shrouded day by day in white mist and brown smoke, the warehouses and chimneys coated in a veil of soot, the legacy of ages. The autumnal fogs, which harmonise discordant tones, round off harsh outlines, cloak the ugly and create the beautiful, are to the foreigner London’s greatest charm, although to the inhabitant they are a deadly infliction.
LA GRENOUILLÈRE · CLAUDE MONET
No writer ever expressed this fascination more eloquently than the “Wizard of the Butterfly Mark,” who wrote: “And when the evening mist clothes the riverside world with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see; and Nature, who, for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.”
With these thoughts Claude Monet is in perfect agreement. He is amazed at the apathy and indifference of British artists, blinded no doubt by familiarity, in allowing so fertile a field of labour to remain comparatively unexplored, not only with regard to the river scenes, but to the Metropolis as a whole. Whistler was fascinated, so was Bastien-Lepage, so is Claude Monet; but the Englishman remains unmoved.
A chapter could be written upon the artist possibilities of the city, and the fringe of the subject would have been then but touched. Where, asks Monet, can more soul-inspiring subjects for the brush be found than in the Strand from morning to night, in the movement of Piccadilly, in the evening colour of Leicester Square, the classic sweep and brilliancy of Regent Street, the bustle of the great railway termini, the dignity of Pall Mall and the sylvan glades of Kensington? They offer themes in such variety that the devotion of a lifetime would not give adequate realisation.
It was during his visit to London with Pissarro and other painters in 1870 that Monet carried an introduction from Daubigny which led to his acquaintance with M. Durand-Ruel, expert connoisseur and most celebrated of all the Parisian art dealers. It proved to be the commencement of a life-long friendship, and established business relations which meant the actual necessities of existence, bread and butter itself, to the struggling Impressionists. During this visit, which had such auspicious results, Monet studied with profound admiration the canvases of Turner in the National Gallery, and he was also able to increase very largely his knowledge of the art of Japan.
In surveying as a whole the work of the last thirty years we can arrive at but a single conclusion—Claude Monet will rank as one of the world’s greatest landscapists, the one who, above all others, has revealed the transcendent beauty of atmospheric effect in its rarest moods, in its most varied manifestations, in rocks, skies, trees, seas, architecture, fogs, snows, even in crowded streets and moving trains. And Monet is not pre-eminent as a painter of easel-pictures alone. In the unique decorations of M. Durand-Ruel’s private apartment, rooms which constitute the most admirable museum of contemporary painting to be found in France, are realistic paintings of different forms of still-life, which fully vindicate his supreme mastership.
Little space can be devoted in these pages to an extended notice of individual canvases, for the output (to use a somewhat commercial term) of Claude Monet has been exceptionally large. Where the whole is of such excellence it is difficult to select the masterpiece upon which can be staked not only the artist’s reputation but the verdict of the future upon the entire movement.
Personally one may say that the Giverny work is the most triumphant exposition of the methods of Impressionism. If the series known as Les Cathédrales be added, one may safely challenge the most critical. It is natural that Giverny should inspire the finest harvest, for, after years of experimental residence, it is here that Monet finally settled in 1883. The dominant note in the Giverny paintings is one of joy in the beauty of life and nature. They are the works of an inspired genius, who never forgets that Beauty is the mission of Art.
Les Meules or The Haystacks, exhibited for the first time at the Durand-Ruel galleries in May 1891, are impressions of a simple and homely subject—two haystacks in a neighbour’s field, standing out in relief against the distant hillside. These twenty canvases, the fruits of a year’s labour, are as novel in conception as unapproachable in style. The artist watched and painted the haystacks in the making, followed and noted the atmospheric effects upon them at every different hour of the day, at every changing season. He portrays them covered with the pearls of dew, baked by the sun, lost in the fog, rimed with early frosts, and covered in snow. Each picture is a masterpiece of beauty, truth and form.
The influence of such creations is world-wide. The annual Salon in Paris demonstrates what a power Monet has become in the land. Almost to a man the younger painters are Impressionistic, whilst not a few of the old generation have revised their methods.
THE BEACH AT ÉTRETAT · CLAUDE MONET
Soon after Les Meules came Les Peupliers, exhibited in March 1892. The Haystacks were a recital of history during the four seasons; the Poplars show us their differing aspects under the changing atmosphere of a single day. Again the subject is of the simplest. Seven great Normandy poplars are reflected in the sluggish waters of a rivulet slowly running through marshy ground. The continuation of the long column of these graceful trees, ever diminishing, is lost in the distance, marking the sinuous course of the stream. The gracefulness of the subject gives it a nobility of effect. The landscapes are poems.
In some of the canvases the master has depicted the dim light of early morn, through which can be seen nebulous tree-trunks, leaves and grass, dank and obscure. Upon the water floats a chill blue mist, broken here and there with the gold rays of the rising sun.
In another canvas the mists have cleared away, morning appears in its superb glory, each dewdrop is a sparkling diamond, each leaf a shimmering gem. The stream throws out a sheen of gold and silver, and the whole picture is flooded with a roseate hue.
Then comes mid-noon. The blue dome of the unclouded sky is reflected in a deeper tint across the still water. The trees are dusty, lifeless, almost colourless. The atmosphere vibrates in an intense silent heat. Nature is taking her siesta,
“For now the mid-day quiet holds the hill:
The grasshopper is silent in the grass;
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead;
The purple flower droops: the golden bee
Is lily-cradled....”
In the last canvas night is shown falling gently upon the land, obscuring, with a veil of rich and sombre colour, trees, foliage, stream. The landscape is lost in sleep.
From the photographs, reproduced by the courtesy of M. Claude Monet, M. Durand-Ruel, M. Paul Chevallier, and M. Georges Petit, little idea can be gathered of the extreme beauty of the originals. The colour and technique of Impressionist pictures seem unfortunately to be insuperable barriers to their reproduction in monochrome. Upon this account it has been thought inadvisable to publish reproductions of any of the Haystack or Cathedral series.
Monet’s marine pictures are marvellous. In them he depicts throbbing, swelling, sighing sea, the trickling rills of water that follow a retreating wave, the glass-like hues of the deep ocean, and the violet transparencies of the shallow inlets over sand. Monet is the greatest living painter of water. Witness the Matins sur la Seine, views painted from the river bank, from the artist’s houseboat, anchored in mid-stream, and on the various islands of the backwaters between Vétheuil and Vernon. The handling is free, loose, and masterly. Never has art expressed, through the hands of a craftsman, anything finer or more virile; never were ideas more frankly expressed, more freshly and more brilliantly executed.
Of the last exhibited group of “effects,” the series known as Les Cathédrales of Rouen, exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in the spring of 1895, Monet writes in a personal note to the author: “I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the Cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.” Despite the immense difficulties involved in their production, Monet considers them to be his finest works. On the other hand, they are the works least understood by the public.
The series consists of twenty-five huge canvases, a feat requiring considerable physical endurance and indomitable perseverance. Each canvas demonstrates the fact that the painter possesses eyes marvellously sensitive to the most subtle modulations of light, and capable of the acutest analysis of luminous phenomena. The façade of the ancient Norman fane is depicted rather by the varying atmospheric effects dissolved in their relative values, than by any actual draughtsmanship of correct architectural lines. It is very regrettable that the series was not purchased “en bloc” for the French nation. The opportunity has been lost. The canvases realised enormous prices, and are now scattered over two continents.
In years to come visitors to Rouen will be shown with pride the little curiosity shop “Au Caprice” on the south-west side of the “Place,” from the windows of which Claude Monet evolved these world-famous paintings of Rouen Cathedral.
The attitude of the press and the public in face of this glorious manifestation of a newly-created art has been, as usual, distinctly and actively antagonistic. Animosity has been pushed so far as to include threats of personal violence to the innovator, and of injury to the offending canvases. It is difficult to believe such stories amidst the recent pæans of praise and adulation. But the contemporary press of the period will prove to be a curious study in the hands of some careful historian of a future age. Readers of the “Figaro,” it may be mentioned, discontinued their subscriptions and advertisements because the band of “lunatic visionaries” were so much as mentioned in its orthodox columns. Dealers required courage in exposing for sale the “aberrations of disordered imaginations.” History monotonously repeats itself. A genius generally goes down broken-hearted to his grave before the world awakes to the value of his creations.
MORNING ON THE SEINE · CLAUDE MONET
ARGENTEUIL · CLAUDE MONET
Paris, “la ville luminaire,” the birthplace of so many revolutions, both artistic and political, has almost invariably been hostile to any new spirit in Art. From memory one can cite many instances. In 1833, Parisians assembled that they might jeer and throw mud at Baryes’s Le Lion, a masterpiece now in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Rude’s great bas-relief, Départ des Volontaires de la République, decorating one of the pillars of the Arc de Triomphe, met with a similar reception. In 1844, the exquisite paintings of Eugene Delacroix, now in the Louvre, were greeted with a storm of ridicule. Carpeaux’s group of sculpture La Danse, ornamenting the façade of the Opera, was bombarded nightly with ink-pots, and the sculptor was broken-hearted when compelled to polish the figures of his magnificent Fontaine des Heures facing the Observatory. Millet and the Barbizon group had small thanks to return for their reception. The frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes in the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Luxembourg had to be guarded against the risk of damage from an ignorant and exasperated public. The vituperation which assailed Rodin upon the completion of his statue of Balzac is quite recent, and cannot be forgotten.
Claude Monet has passed through like storms. Edouard Manet fell a victim to the fury of the attack. His physique was not strong enough to resist the continual warfare. But Monet is of stouter calibre, and has lived to see the triumph of his principles, although he has learnt to value much of the praise, nowadays lavished upon him, at its true worth.
Monet is seen in his most genial moods when, with cigar for company, he strolls through his “propriété” at Giverny, discussing the grafting of plants and other agricultural mysteries with his numerous blue-bloused and sabotted gardeners. He settled with his family at Giverny in 1883; and Stephen Mallarmé, his old friend the poet, has given us the address for his letters:
“Monsieur Monet, que l’hiver ni
L’été sa vision ne leurre,
Habite en peignant, Giverny,
Sis auprès de Vernon, dans l’Eure.”
He is now sixty-two years of age, in the prime of his powers, active and dauntless as ever. Each line of his sturdy figure, each flash from his keen blue eyes, betokens the giant within. He is one of those men who, through dogged perseverance and strength, would succeed in any branch of activity. Dressed in a soft khaki felt hat and jacket, lavender-coloured silk shirt open at the neck, drab trousers tapering to the ankles and there secured by big horn buttons, a short pair of cowhide boots, his appearance is at once practical and quaint, with a decided sense of smartness pervading the whole.
Monet has the reputation of being surly and reserved with strangers. If true, this manner must have been assumed to repel those unwelcome visitors who, out of thoughtless curiosity, invade his privacy to the waste of valuable time and the gradual irritation of a most sensitive nature.
Determination is the keynote of Monet’s character, as the following anecdote (told me on the spot by the poet Rollinat) shows. In the spring of 1892 the artist was busily occupied painting in the neighbourhood of Fresselines, a wild and picturesque region of precipitous cliffs and huge boulders in the valleys of the Creuse and Petit Creuse. A huge oak-tree, standing out in bold relief against the ruddy cliffs, was occupying Monet’s whole attention. Studies of it were taken at every possible angle, in every varying atmosphere of the day. Bad weather intervened, wet and foggy, and operations were suspended for three weeks. When Monet set up his easel again the tree was in full bud, and completely metamorphosed. An average painter would have quitted the spot in disgust. Not so Monet. Without hesitation he called out the whole village, made the carpenter foreman, and gave imperative orders that not a single leaf was to be visible by the same hour on the following morning. The work was accomplished, and next day Monet was able to continue work upon his canvases. One admires the painter, and feels sorry for the unhappy tree.
After painting, Monet’s chief recreation is gardening. In his domain at Giverny, and in his Japanese water-garden across the road and railway (which to his lasting sorrow cuts his little world in twain), each season of the year brings its appointed and distinguishing colour scheme. Nowhere else can be found such a prodigal display of rare and marvellously beautiful colour effects, arranged from flowering plants gathered together without regard to expense from every quarter of the globe.
Like the majority of Impressionists, Monet is most pleased with schemes of yellow and blue, the gold and sapphire of an artist’s dreams.
A RIVER SCENE · CLAUDE MONET
In the neighbouring fields are hundreds of poplars standing in long regimental lines. These trees, which inspired Les Peupliers, were bought by Monet to avoid the wholesale destruction which threatened every tree in the Seine valley a few years ago. The building authorities of the Paris Exhibition required materials for palisading, and thousands of trees were ruthlessly felled to make a cosmopolitan holiday.
A LADY IN HER GARDEN · CLAUDE MONET
In the distance are the mills, subjects of the master’s admiration and reproduction, yearly copied by the scores of students and amateurs who, year by year, during the summer, journey through this delightful country.
In the peace of Giverny we leave the great painter. He is one of the few original members of the Impressionist group who has lived to see the almost complete reversal of the hostile judgment passed upon his canvases by an ill-educated public. Now he is able to enjoy not only the satisfaction of having his principles acknowledged, but also the receipt of the material fruits of a world-wide renown. Not often do pioneers succeed so thoroughly.
Success in the sale-room is not always the same thing as artistic success, but some information as to the prices Monet now commands may prove of value. The New York Herald, referring to the well-known Chocquet auction, says: “It will be observed that the works by Monet are sought after and purchased at high prices, which are moreover justified by collectors as well as by dealers.” At the present moment a small example (about 26 in. by 32 in.) can be had for any price from four hundred guineas upwards.
After the Chocquet sale, dealers of all nationalities flocked down to Giverny. Two series of impressions, entitled Water Lilies and Green Bridges, were carried off, and the art public were deprived of seeing them exhibited as a whole, their creator’s original intention.
The dealers were ready to buy every canvas Monet had in his studio, even down to the numerous studies he had condemned. Needless to say that with regard to the latter they were disappointed, and the destroying fires will still claim their own. In discussing with the writer this sudden and extraordinary popularity, Monet remarked: “Yes, my friend, to-day I cannot paint enough, and make probably fifteen thousand pounds a year; twenty years ago I was starving.” Only artists can fully appreciate the philosophy of this short sentence.
The principal private collectors of Monet’s work are, in Paris, M. Durand-Ruel, Count Camondo, M. Faure, M. Dearp, M. Pellerin, M. Gallimard, and M. Bérard. In Rouen, M. Depeaux. In the United States, Messrs. C. Lambert Paterson and Potter Palmer of Chicago, Frank Thompson of Philadelphia, A. A. Pape of Cleveland, and H. O. Havemeyer of New York. All these rich collections of modern art are most generously thrown open to the inspection and enjoyment of students and lovers of art.
Claude Monet is in the possession of undiminished vigour, and the list of his works will yet receive the names of many fresh triumphs. A life of strenuous labour, unflagging perseverance in the pursuit of a high ideal from which he has never flinched, the production of a long series of magnificent canvases—these great qualities of true and inspired genius merit and receive our deepest admiration, our most sincere and genuine homage.
INTERIOR—AFTER DINNER · CLAUDE MONET
CHURCH OF ST. JACQUES, DIEPPE · CAMILLE PISSARRO