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