CLAUDE MONET
THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR
So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day. This is the principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous of these series are the Hay-ricks, the Poplars, the Cliffs of Etretat, the Golfe Juan, the Coins de Rivière, the Cathedrals, the Water-lilies, and finally the Thames series which Monet is at present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the symphonic parti-pris of the colours, make their realism, the minute contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.
Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick; at ten o'clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange, predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights, just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette—tree, hay-rick, or rock—is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.
CLAUDE MONET
THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE
Generally he finds a very simple motif sufficient; a hay-rick, some slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river, or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece, where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria. He has found Brittany, Holland, the Ile de France, the Cote d'Azur and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of Belle-Isle en mer, to express it in pictures in which one really feels the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of Water-lilies expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland, bouquets, effects of snow and hoar frost of exquisite softness, and sailing boats passing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a great, amorous and radiant colourist. The Cathedrals are even more of a tour de force of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture, leaving barely a little space, a little corner of the square, at the foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome, the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun, standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist, the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.
CLAUDE MONET
POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN