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.