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.”