Monet, like many great men, had little schooling. He went direct to nature, impelled by the new impetus toward landscape. His first pictures in the Impressionist manner resemble Manet’s except for trivial innovations in the differentiation of shadows; but in this difference we divine the later Monet. Viewed cursorily these paintings appear to be conventional figure pieces. But they are more than that. The figures have no other significance than that which attaches to a vase or a landscape. “Facial expression,” “sympathetic gestures,” the “appeal”—all are absent from them. In these pictures the costume plays the hero’s part. La Japonaise is representative of that treatment of subject wherein the figure is only an excuse for a pattern of colour. The modern attitude toward theme which Manet handed down is again in evidence in Monet. Its reductio ad absurdum was the late epidemic of illustrative pictures by such men as Whistler, Shannon, Sargent, Zuloaga and Alexander, the titles of which were derived from the flowers held in the hands of the principals, a bowl of goldfish in the background, or the colour of a lace shawl.
Monet, however, soon tired of figure pieces. His true penchant lay toward landscape. In this field he found an infinity of colour possibilities, innumerable subtleties of light gradation, and ready-to-paint arrangements as appealing as the ones he had formerly had to pose in his interiors. At first his technique was broad and radiant, much like a dispersed Manet. The large flat planes of unified colour which later were to disintegrate into a thousand touches, were laid on silhouetted forms. His boat pieces in the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg gallery, appear, in their simplicity and breadth of treatment, like the unfinished underpainting of a Turner or a Rembrandt. Much of the bare canvas is visible; and in them one feels the presence of the experimenter. At this time the war drove Monet to London, and his exile proved a salutary one. On his return his pictures bloomed with a new brilliance, and his flat surfaces became fragmentised. Racial characteristics no doubt establish a bond between Sisley and the English landscapists, but nothing less than an active influence could have made so typical a Frenchman as Monet paint a canvas like L’Église à Varengeville in which Turner is so much in evidence. Turner is also unmistakably present in Pissarro at times, as witness Sydenham Road, but never to any great extent.
| WATERLOO BRIDGE | MONET |
Despite his great debt to Turner, Manet and Pissarro, Monet owed even more to the Japanese. They influenced his style and his selection of subjects. From them he lifted the idea of painting a single object many times in its varied atmospheric manifestations. But where the Japanese shifted their vantage-ground with each successive picture, Monet’s observation point remained stationary. His composition too, superficial as it is, is frankly Japanese. It is generally represented by a straight line which runs near the lower frame from one side to the other of the canvas, and which supports the principal objects of the work. This line slants, now up to the left, now up to the right; but seldom is it curved as in the more advanced drawings of Hiroshige or Hokusai. His kinship to the Japanese is, after all, a natural one, for the temperaments of France and Japan are as similar as is possible between east and west. The Japanese artists presented atmospheric conditions by means of gradating large colour planes into white or dark. The consequent effects of rain, snow, wind and sun are as vivid as Monet’s, but they differ from the Frenchman’s in that they are concerned principally with nature’s decorative possibilities. Monet adheres to graphic transcription for the purpose of presenting the dynamics of a mood-producing phase of nature. But though differing as to aims, they both reach very similar visual results. Compare, for instance, Monet’s suite of Les Peupliers with Hiroshige’s series of the Tokaido or with Hokusai’s Views of Fuji. Many of the pictures are alike in composition and choice of subject; but the European has achieved a living light, while the Oriental has presented a more lucid and intensive vision. These differences of purposes and similarities of appearance are again discernible in Monet’s Coins de Rivière and Shiubun’s Setting Sun. A further proof of this Impressionist’s affinities with the Japanese will be found by collating Monet’s figure pieces with those of Utamaro.
There is one important point of divergence, however, between the arts of Japan and Monet’s canvases. Whereas the Japanese ignored texture, Monet at all times devoted himself more or less sedulously to its portrayal. The Falaise à Étretat and The Houses of Parliament—London are examples of his freedom from a rigid system of scientific application. In both pictures the sky is drawn with broad intersecting strokes in order to achieve transparency and vastness. The water, in the former, is painted with long curved strippings to give the wave effect, as in Courbet’s La Vague; and, in the latter, ripples are formed by minute touches. Monet’s architecture is often built up with colour-spots as a man lays bricks; and the cliffs in the Falaise à Étretat are corrugated in exactly the same way the strata lie in nature. Later this preciosity of style disappeared, except in his treatment of slightly ruffled water. His brushing became irregular and elongated, and he applied his stroke so that it would merge into the other innumerable touches of diverse colour. His eyesight was highly trained, and after years of labour in the conscious analysis of colour planes, he was able to divide these planes unconsciously.
Monet was artistic in that he felt deeply what was before him. Henri Martin, on the other hand, who painted with independent touches in the hope of obtaining flickering sunlight, and who knew his palette fully as well as Monet, laboured mechanically. His work is more optical than emotional. He is a realist in the same sense that Roll is a realist; but both these men present only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary, experienced and expressed nature’s ecstasy. He is like a string which vibrates to any harmony: Martin is little more than an eye. Both finished their work in the open; and both stippled. But here the parallelism ends, for where Monet completed the effects of the Japanese, Martin only took light into the academies. Perhaps this is why Martin was at once acclaimed by the public, and why Monet, during those first dark years of struggle and poverty, was compelled to sell his canvases for practically nothing. Duret confesses to having obtained one for eighty francs. Martin was early accorded academic honours, and received numerous government orders.
Monet found himself at home wherever there was light and water. His canvases describe scenes from all over Europe. But his most famous pictures are his two series, Les Meules and Les Nymphéas. In the first, a single haystack is set forth in a diversity of illuminations and seasons; and the second repeats a small pond of water-lilies, in shade and in sun, ruffled and calm. His La Cathédrale, Venice and London series are also widely known. These represent acute observation and an implacable inspiration to work, for they had to be finished simultaneously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous tour de force. At sunrise Monet would go forth with twenty blank canvases so that the changes of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour to hour. They seem infantile to us today—these imitations of the subtleties of light, these meteorological histories of haystacks and lilies, these atmospheric personalities of cathedrals and canals. Yet it is by just such self-burials in data that one exhausts the æsthetic possibilities of nature’s actualities. And not until this probing to the bottom has been accomplished does the artist possess that complete knowledge which impels him to push forward to something newer and more vital.
Sisley was the last of the original five to adopt Impressionistic methods. He had long had an admiration for the exploits of the more revolutionary painters, but a comfortable income had acted as a sedative on his ambitions. He did not feel the necessity for difficult endeavour. But when, at the death of his father, he found himself penniless and with a family to care for, he joined the ranks of Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Bazille. He had talent and an accurate eye, and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties, served as a practical foundation. After he had adopted the more modern technique of Pissarro and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement of new art. If we had no other proof that Impressionism at its inception was a shallow craft, Sisley’s immediate mastery of it would be conclusive, for his appropriation of its means was not an æsthetic impulse but a financial expedient. But more extensive corroboration can be found in a score of academies where Impressionism is taught and taught conclusively.