Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter, founder of Impressionist painting, considered a key precursor of modernism, especially for his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it.
During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions of nature, especially as applied to outdoor landscape painting.
The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting “Impression, sunrise” , exhibited at the 1874 exhibition (“exhibition of rejects”) initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.
Monet grew up in Le Havre, Normandy, and from an early age was interested in the outdoors and drawing. Although his mother, Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, supported his ambitions to be a painter, his father, Claude-Adolphe, disapproved and wanted him to pursue a career in business. He was very close to his mother, but she died in January 1857, when he was sixteen, and he was sent to live with his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, widowed and childless, but wealthy.
He studied at the Académie Suisse and with the academic history painter Charles Gleyre, where he was a companion of Auguste Renoir. His early works include landscapes, seascapes and portraits, but attracted little attention. One of his early influences was Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to the concept of plein air painting.
From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, also in northern France, where he bought a house and property and began an extensive landscape project, including a water lily pond.
Monet’s ambition to document the French countryside led him to paint the same scene many times to capture the changing light and the passing of the seasons. Among the best known examples are his series of haystacks (1890-91), the paintings of Rouen Cathedral (1894) and the water lily paintings in his garden at Giverny that occupied him continuously for the last 20 years of his life.
Frequently and successfully exhibited during his lifetime, Monet’s fame and popularity skyrocketed in the second half of the 20th century, when he became one of the most famous painters in the world and a source of inspiration for groups of emerging artists.
In this article we are going to show you 10 of the most outstanding works of this artist.
1- Woman with a Parasol
Woman with Parasol – Madame Monet and her Son, sometimes known as The Promenade (French: La Promenade) is an oil on canvas by Claude Monet from 1875.
The Impressionist work depicts his wife Camille Monet and their son Jean Monet in the period between 1871 and 1877, while living in Argenteuil, capturing a moment of a stroll on a windy summer day.
Monet’s light, spontaneous brushstrokes create splashes of color. Mrs. Monet’s veil is moved by the wind, as is her billowing white dress; the waving grass of the meadow is echoed in the green underside of her parasol. She is seen as if from below, with a strong upward perspective, against fluffy white clouds in a blue sky.
A boy, Monet’s seven-year-old son, is situated farther away, hidden behind a rise in the ground and visible only from the waist up, creating a sense of depth.
The work is a genre painting of an everyday family scene, not a formal portrait.It was painted outdoors, en plein air, and quickly, probably in a single period of a few hours. It measures 100 × 81 centimeters, Monet’s largest work of the 1870s, and is signed “Claude Monet 75” in the lower right corner.
The painting was one of 18 works by Monet exhibited at the second Impressionist exhibition in April 1876, at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery. Ten years later, Monet returned to a similar subject, painting in 1886 a pair of scenes featuring the daughter of his second wife, Suzanne Monet, with a parasol in a meadow at Giverny; they are in the Musée d’Orsay. John Singer Sargent saw the painting at the 1876 exhibition and was later inspired to create a similar painting, Two Girls with Parasol at Fladbury, in 1889.
2- Bain a la Granouillere
Bain à la Grenouillère is an oil on canvas from 1869 . It depicts the “island of the pot”, also known as the Camembert, and the gangway of the Grenouillère, a floating restaurant and charter boat on the Seine in Croissy-sur-Seine. He was accompanied by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who also painted the scene at the same time.
Monet wrote on September 25, 1869 in a letter to his colleague Frédéric Bazille:
“I have a dream, a painting , the baths of La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches , but it is only a dream” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting”
Monet and Renoir, both desperately poor, were very close at the time.
This painting and another in the National Gallery in London are probably the sketches mentioned by Monet in his letter. A larger painting, now lost, but which belonged to the Arnhold collection in Berlin, could be the “altarpiece” of which he dreamed. The broad, constructive brushstrokes of this painting are clearly those of a sketch
For his exhibition paintings, Monet usually sought a more delicate and carefully calibrated surface at this time. An almost identical composition of the same subject by Renoir, La Grenouillère, is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. There is no doubt that the two friends worked side by side.
La Grenouillère was a popular middle-class resort with a spa, a yachting establishment and a floating café. Optimistically promoted as“Trouville-sur-Seine,” it was located on the Seine near Bougival, easily accessible by train from Paris, and had just been favored with a visit from Emperor Napoleon III with his wife and son. Both Monet and Renoir recognized in La Grenouillère an ideal subject for the leisure images they hoped to sell.
La Grenouillère is the setting for Guy de Maupassant’s 1881 short story “La femme de Paul”. It is described as a place where:
“one smells, deep in our nostrils, the froth of the world, all its distinguished scoundrels, the mold of Parisian society: a mixture of salesmen, braggarts, low-life journalists, accompanied young men, corrupt amateurs of the stock exchange, partying cretins, desiccated old pleasure-seekers; a murky crowd of all suspicious beings, half-known, half-lost, half-greeted, half-disgraced, swindlers, rascals, purveyors of women, gentlemen of industry with a dignified look, the look of a braggart who seems to say: ‘The first one who calls me a rascal, I’ll bust him’.”
3- Impression, Sunrise
Impression, sunrise (French: Impression, soleil levant) is an 1872 painting by Claude Monet that was first exhibited at what would become known as the “Impressionists’ Exhibition” in Paris in April 1874. This painting is credited with inspiring the name of the Impressionist movement.
Impression, sunrise” depicts the port of Le Havre, Monet’s hometown. It is currently on display at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris.
Monet visited his hometown of Le Havre, in northwestern France, in 1872 and proceeded to create a series of works depicting the port of Le Havre. The six painted canvases depict the port “during dawn, day, dusk and dark and from different points of view, some from the water itself and others from a hotel room looking out over the harbor.”
Impression, sunrise became the most famous of the series after it was premiered in April 1874 in Paris at an exhibition of the group “Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. Inc.”. Among the thirty participants, the exhibition was headed by Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, and featured more than two hundred works that were seen by some 4,000 people, including some unsympathetic critics.
In 1985 the painting was stolen from the Marmottan Monet Museum by Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun. It was recovered and returned to the museum in 1990, and put back on display in 1991.
4- Saint-Georges majeur au crépuscule
Saint-Georges majeur au crépuscule refers to an impressionist painting by Claude Monet, which exists in more than one version. It is part of a series of views of the island-monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. This series is, in turn, part of a larger series of views of Venice that Monet began in 1908 during his only visit to the city.
Although the view from the hotel included the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the painting at sunset appears to have been seen from the promenade known as the Riva degli Schiavoni, where the island forms a focal point of the view. Monet is said to have been reluctant to paint from the promenade. He disliked the crowds of tourists and was also concerned about conforming to other artists who were attracted to Venice, such as Renoir or Manet
San Giorgio Maggiore was a favorite subject of painters, including the proto-Impressionist Turner.
Monet considered Venice to be a city “too beautiful to be painted,” which may be why he returned with many unfinished paintings to Giverny, his home in France. However, he had already retreated from his earlier practice of painting from the natural, in front of the subject. He worked on the Venetian scenes at home and the death of his wife Alice in 1911 seems to have been a factor in their completion.
5- The artist’s garden at Giverny
The Artist’s Garden at Giverny (French: Le Jardin de l’artiste à Giverny) is an oil painting on canvas by Claude Monet executed in 1900 and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
It is one of many works by the artist about his garden at Giverny during the last thirty years of his life. The painting shows rows of lilies in various shades of purple and pink placed diagonally across the picture plane. The flowers are under trees which, as they let in the dappled light, change the hue of their colors. Beyond the trees Monet’s house comes into view.
Monet was 60 years old the year he painted this picture, and had produced an immense body of work
In 1900, the year of this painting, he embarked on two major projects: a series of the River Thames in London and another series of his water gardens at Giverny, including some of his famous water lily paintings, such as The Water Lily Pond (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
His dealer Durand-Ruel exhibited recent works, including a dozen Water Lilies and bought the painting Mosque (Arabian Feast) by his friend Renoir.
6- Camille
Camille, also known as The Woman in a Green Dress, is an oil on canvas from 1866
The portrait shows Monet’s future wife, Camille Doncieux, wearing a green dress and jacket. Monet submitted the work to the 1866 Paris Salon, where it was well received by critics. The painting is preserved in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen.
Camille in the Green Dress is a life-size portrait. Camille wears a green and black striped silk dress over a black jacket trimmed with fur. The emerald green dress corresponded to the fashion of the time with the contrasting vertical stripes. Yellow leather gloves and a dark cloak decorated with feathers serve as accessories. Camille wears her hair pulled back in a bun tied with black ribbons at the nape of her neck. The background of the painting is a dark red, almost black backdrop.
Through the composition of the image, Monet manages to convey movement. The tail of the dress has been cut off at the left edge of the painting, causing a movement in this direction that goes beyond the edge of the painting.
The play of folds in the skirt also creates vivacity. The position of the head, slightly turned back, represents a moment of pause in the painting. The figure seems to be listening to herself rather than reacting to someone speaking to her. This is achieved by lowering her eyes and thus avoiding eye contact with the viewer. The painting is signed on the lower right by Claude Monet in 1866.
The lighting in this painting is unique in that it is diffused and the source of the lighting is dark. We see a sort of semicircle of light surrounding Camilla on the ground, the source of which especially highlights her face, her hand and her skirt
The light is probably coming from a window, as it looks too natural to be produced by candles or gas lamps. The location of the window is difficult to pinpoint, but it is probably to the left and in front of her, as her shadow is cast to the right, but her face and skirt still stand out.
7- Water Lilies
Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by Claude Monet. The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic output during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet was suffering from cataracts.
Monet’s preference for producing and exhibiting a series of paintings related by subject and perspective began in 1889, with at least ten paintings done in the Creuse Valley, which were exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit. Among his other famous series are his Haystacks.
In the 1920s, the French state built a pair of oval rooms in the Musée de l’Orangerie as a permanent home for eight water lily murals by Monet. The exhibition opened to the public on May 16, 1927, a few months after Monet’s death. Sixty water lily paintings from around the world were brought together for a special exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1999.
The paintings are on display in museums around the world, including the Princeton University Art Museum, the Marmottan Monet Museum, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Museum of Wales, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, the Toled Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Legion of Honor.
In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston celebrated its 150th anniversary with some of Monet’s Water Lilies paintings.
7- Haystacks
Haystacks is the common title of a series of impressionist paintings by Monet. The main subject of each painting in the series is heaps of harvested wheat (or possibly barley or oats: the original French title, Les Meules à Giverny, simply means The Heaps of Giverny). It refers primarily to a series of twenty-five canvases that Monet began in the late summer of 1890 and continued through the following spring, although Monet also produced five earlier paintings on the same mound theme.
The series is famous for the way Monet repeats the same subject to show the differences in light and atmosphere at different times of day, throughout the seasons, and in many types of weather.
This series is one of Monet’s most notable works. The largest collections of Pajares are in the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Other collections include those of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. The Art Institute of Chicago’s collection includes six of the twenty-five paintings in the series.
Other museums that hold portions of this series include the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut (which also has one of the five from the earlier 1888-89 vintage), the Scottish National Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. Private collections hold the rest of the paintings.
8- Women in the Garden
Women in the Garden (French: Femmes au jardin) is an oil painting begun in 1866 by Claude Monet when he was 26 years old. It is a large work painted en plein air; the size of the canvas forced Monet to paint its upper half with the canvas lowered into a ditch he had dug, so that he could maintain a single point of view throughout the work.
The setting is the garden of a property he rented. His companion and future wife Camille Doncieux poses for the figures. Monet completed the work in interiors and used illustrations from magazines to depict the fashionable clothes.
At this time, Monet was at the beginning of his career, experimenting with method and subject matter. His early paintings were successful in the Paris Salons, but Women in the Garden was rejected in 1867 for its subject matter and narrative weakness. The Salon was also concerned about Monet’s heavy brushwork, a style that would, of course, become one of the hallmarks of Impressionism. One judge commented, “Too many young people think of nothing but continuing in this abominable direction. It is high time to protect them and save art.” The painting was acquired by his colleague Frédéric Bazille to help Monet at a time when he had no money.
9- Boulevard des Capucines
The Boulevard des Capucines is an oil on canvas painting of a street scene of the famous Paris boulevard done by Monet in 1873.
From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists met with rejection from the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts, which held its annual exhibition at the Paris Salon
In late 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley organize the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs to exhibit their works independently. At their first exhibition, held in April 1874, Monet exhibited the work that would give the group its definitive name, Impression, sunrise. Among the works Monet included in the first Impressionist exhibition was The Luncheon, 1868, featuring Camille Doncieux and Jean Monet. The painting was rejected by the Paris Salon of 1870.
This exhibition also included a painting entitled Boulevard des Capucines, a painting of the boulevard made from the apartment of the photographer Nadar at No. 35. Monet painted the subject twice and it is not known for certain which of the two paintings, the one now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, or the one in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, was the one that appeared in the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition, although the Moscow painting has recently been favored.
10- The Magpie
The Magpie (French: La Pie) is a landscape painted in oil on canvas, created during the winter of 1868-1869 near the commune of Étretat in Normandy
Monet’s patron, Louis Joachim Gaudibert, helped secure a house in Étretat for Monet’s fiancée, Camille Doncieux, and her newborn son, which allowed Monet to paint in relative comfort, surrounded by his family.
Between 1867 and 1893, Monet and his fellow Impressionists Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro painted hundreds of landscapes illustrating the natural effect of snow (effet de neige). Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Gauguin painted similar winter pictures in smaller numbers. Art historians believe that a series of severe winters in France contributed to an increase in the number of winter landscapes produced by the Impressionists.
The Magpie is one of approximately 140 snowscapes produced by Monet. His first snowscape, A Carriage on the Snowy Road in Honfleur, was painted sometime in 1865 or 1867, followed by a remarkable series of snowscapes in the same year, beginning with The Road in Front of Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter. The Magpie was completed in 1869 and is Monet’s largest winter painting. It was followed by The Red Cape (1869-1871), the only known winter painting featuring Camille Doncieux.
The canvas of The Magpie depicts a lone black magpie perched on a gate formed in a wattle fence, as the sunlight shines on the freshly fallen snow creating blue shadows. This painting is one of the earliest examples of Monet’s use of colored shadows, which would later become associated with the Impressionist movement
Monet and the Impressionists used colored shadows to represent the real and changing conditions of light and shadow in nature, challenging the academic convention of painting shadows in black. This subjective theory of color perception was introduced into the art world through the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Michel Eugène Chevreul at the turn of the century.
At the time, Monet’s innovative use of light and color led to his rejection at the Paris Salon of 1869. Today, art historians consider The Magpie to be one of Monet’s finest snowy landscapes. The painting was in private hands until the Musée d’Orsay acquired it in 1984; it is considered one of the most popular paintings in its permanent collection.
