In the last canvas night is shown falling gently upon the land, obscuring, with a veil of rich and sombre colour, trees, foliage, stream. The landscape is lost in sleep.
From the photographs, reproduced by the courtesy of M. Claude Monet, M. Durand-Ruel, M. Paul Chevallier, and M. Georges Petit, little idea can be gathered of the extreme beauty of the originals. The colour and technique of Impressionist pictures seem unfortunately to be insuperable barriers to their reproduction in monochrome. Upon this account it has been thought inadvisable to publish reproductions of any of the Haystack or Cathedral series.
Monet’s marine pictures are marvellous. In them he depicts throbbing, swelling, sighing sea, the trickling rills of water that follow a retreating wave, the glass-like hues of the deep ocean, and the violet transparencies of the shallow inlets over sand. Monet is the greatest living painter of water. Witness the Matins sur la Seine, views painted from the river bank, from the artist’s houseboat, anchored in mid-stream, and on the various islands of the backwaters between Vétheuil and Vernon. The handling is free, loose, and masterly. Never has art expressed, through the hands of a craftsman, anything finer or more virile; never were ideas more frankly expressed, more freshly and more brilliantly executed.
Of the last exhibited group of “effects,” the series known as Les Cathédrales of Rouen, exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in the spring of 1895, Monet writes in a personal note to the author: “I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the Cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.” Despite the immense difficulties involved in their production, Monet considers them to be his finest works. On the other hand, they are the works least understood by the public.
The series consists of twenty-five huge canvases, a feat requiring considerable physical endurance and indomitable perseverance. Each canvas demonstrates the fact that the painter possesses eyes marvellously sensitive to the most subtle modulations of light, and capable of the acutest analysis of luminous phenomena. The façade of the ancient Norman fane is depicted rather by the varying atmospheric effects dissolved in their relative values, than by any actual draughtsmanship of correct architectural lines. It is very regrettable that the series was not purchased “en bloc” for the French nation. The opportunity has been lost. The canvases realised enormous prices, and are now scattered over two continents.
In years to come visitors to Rouen will be shown with pride the little curiosity shop “Au Caprice” on the south-west side of the “Place,” from the windows of which Claude Monet evolved these world-famous paintings of Rouen Cathedral.
The attitude of the press and the public in face of this glorious manifestation of a newly-created art has been, as usual, distinctly and actively antagonistic. Animosity has been pushed so far as to include threats of personal violence to the innovator, and of injury to the offending canvases. It is difficult to believe such stories amidst the recent pæans of praise and adulation. But the contemporary press of the period will prove to be a curious study in the hands of some careful historian of a future age. Readers of the “Figaro,” it may be mentioned, discontinued their subscriptions and advertisements because the band of “lunatic visionaries” were so much as mentioned in its orthodox columns. Dealers required courage in exposing for sale the “aberrations of disordered imaginations.” History monotonously repeats itself. A genius generally goes down broken-hearted to his grave before the world awakes to the value of his creations.
MORNING ON THE SEINE · CLAUDE MONET
