Claude Monet best paintings. How did the movement "impressionism" appear? The most famous paintings by Claude Monet

Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the most famous artists in history. The French artist is one of the founders and one of the most prominent representatives impressionism in painting.

Today are in the most famous museums peace. His art plays an important role in the development of painting. Claude Monet, being extraordinarily talented artist, began to work in a special style, the main objective which was to convey not the accuracy of the surrounding world and its realism, but the impression, character, atmosphere. It is worth noting that it was thanks to one of his paintings that the name was given to a whole trend in art - impressionism. It happened at one of the exhibitions of the Impressionists, where Monet presented his work called “Impression. Rising Sun” (“Impression, soleil levant”). A critic who visited the exhibition wrote: "There was nothing but impressions on it." After that to the artists this direction and the name “impressionists” (impressionnisme) was attached, which literally means “impression” or “impressionists”.

After 1912, when Claude Monet underwent eye surgery, his paintings took on new colors. Due to the fact that the artist lost the lens in his left eye, he began to see ultraviolet light. He saw ultraviolet as blue or purple, which is why quite unusual and uncharacteristic colors began to appear in the artist’s paintings. Claude Monet began to see the whole environment in slightly different colors than other people see. During his life, Monet painted many wonderful paintings, but there are also works in his collection that considered the most famous and, consequently, the most expensive. The most expensive among all the paintings is "Pond with water lilies." This picture was written in 1919. In 2008, it was sold at Christie's for $80,451,178.

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The most famous paintings of the artist Claude Monet

Boulevard of the Capucines

Water lilies

Gare Saint-Lazare

Impression. Rising Sun

Girl with umbrella facing left

Women in the garden

Breakfast on the grass

Camilla in Japanese kimono

Waterloo Bridge, cloudy weather

Very often this artist is confused with his fellow artist Edouard Manet. Both are artists, but very different style… Although somewhere they even converge in their canvases, they are still different. Yes, and they have different ways of starting development. But still about Claude Monet. This artist started out as a caricature. Yes, from the very, perhaps, light and not easy genre of painting. His caricatures appeared from the school bench, when, not wanting to study, he drew more and more. I drew my classmates, my teachers, my neighbors. Monet did not justify the hopes of his parents, did not continue the work of his father, but became famous throughout Le Havre, this is the city where he lived, thanks to his caricatures. Moreover, to the surprise of his parents, he began to earn money on this, selling his works to those whom he portrayed for twenty francs. There were so many cartoons that in a local shop they were displayed in several rows in a window. There, on this showcase, paintings by another artist, Eugene Boudin, were sold. The works of this artist, on the contrary, were not valued and were even considered vulgar, although they were only local landscapes. And the young Monet was infuriated that Boudin's works took up a lot of space and he could not put his own more. The owner of the shop tried many times to introduce them, but it still did not work out. But once it did happen, and since then it is believed that Monet began to turn from a caricaturist into a painter.

It was Boudin who became Monet's first teacher. It was he who gave him the first skills of the painter. He taught me to draw not only caricatures, but also simply depict landscapes, still lifes, portraits. And he opened a different world of painting, the inner one, which is not visible to everyone.

Somehow, after that, almost everything began to take shape successfully. It was Boudin who insisted that the guy visit Paris and try to find out about entering the Academy of Arts. Monet's parents were neither against nor for ... they hesitated, but still they allowed their son to just go on reconnaissance ... And Claude Monet ended up in Paris. And immediately visited the exhibition of artists, then he himself showed his work. They were praised, but still drew attention to some shortcomings. Monet decides to stay in Paris for as long as he can. Parents stopped helping, because the son was not going to study. It’s good that there was an aunt who provided money, and then actually saved his life by buying him out of the army, where he managed to catch a “fashionable” disease - typhoid fever. There was then an attempt to enter the University at the Faculty of Arts, but he got bored there and left. And ends up in Gleyer's studio. There he meets Basil, Sisley and Renoir. It is these artists who later become the backbone of the Impressionist group and in general as a whole. artistic direction- Impressionism, the name of this direction was given by Claude Monet. And it all started with his canvas - “Impression. Rising Sun". This is the beginning of what still amazes many and at the same time causes a lot of controversy. Notice so far.

Further, Monet was not broken by personal losses. He lost his first wife, then, having married a second time, he lost this wife as well. The worst thing is the loss of a son. And then he himself fell seriously ill, and this illness threatened him with the fact that he would stop painting. A double cataract is a disease that got in his way, but after undergoing two operations, he did not give up his talent and continued to create. And then the unexpected happened: due to operations and changes in the eye, he began to see some colors in the ultraviolet. And because some colors he saw quite differently. Before last day Monet did not lower his brush, he painted canvases and continued to amaze his fans with his talent.

Alexey Vasin

Creation

Rapid development European painting at the end of the 19th century provoked an involuntary crisis of the genre. Despite the fact that Europe of those years gave the world many talented artists, society felt tired of the social themes that had become too common in painting. There was discontent among the artists themselves.

Claude Monet, considered the founder french impressionism, at the beginning of his career, he faced both rejection of the current, which he initiated, and an enthusiastic passion for it. It all started after the artist, upon his return from London, created a landscape in one evening, which depicted the setting sun, illuminating the sea with red rays. Monet called the painting simply “Sunrise. Impression".

By this, he wanted to emphasize that he did not try to sketch nature exactly, but only convey the impression of what he experienced while looking at the sunrise. The picture made an unexpected sensation. Some critics were dissatisfied with such a frivolous approach to painting, others were delighted, as they discovered a new way of conveying reality.

Impressionism (from the French "impression") is characterized by a subtle approach to displaying reality. Only the first impression is sketched, the movement of the texture of clothes, hair, trees, water and even air is conveyed with dynamic strokes. Impressionist paintings are airy, mobile, full of pure colors and delicate halftones.

Monet's paintings are fully consistent with this style. At the beginning of the 20th century, the artist created a series of landscape paintings that glorified him for many decades to come. Such canvases include "Water Lilies", "Mannaport", "Water Lilies", "Field of Poppies at Argenteuil". All these paintings are painted with light strokes that convey the breath and fabric of living and inanimate matter. Society, tired of serious topics, reacted with gratitude and enthusiasm to the simple subjects in Monet's paintings.

The artist concentrates on conveying the mood of the same place at different times of the year and day. Then the famous series of paintings "Haystack" is born. Depicting the same topic over and over again, Monet finds new angles, new solutions in the transfer of reality.

The artist has a special perception and style of transmission white color. In his paintings, pure white does not seem to exist. Instead, white water lilies, and white foam on the waves, and clouds have bluish, bluish and lilac shades. Monet, like the rest of the Impressionists, avoided black in his paintings. Instead, they used purple paint.

Many of Monet's paintings are characterized by a romantic and airy perception of urban landscapes. The artist's painting "Parliament Building at Sunset" is one of the most expensive paintings in the world. Monet managed to capture the London Parliament there, shrouded in the famous fog and clouds.

Paintings by Claude Monet - a kind of measure artistic value impressionism. His canvases adorn the paintings of the world's largest museums, including the St. Petersburg Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Igor Chergeiko

Impressionism

The principle of optical color mixing, based on the phenomena of nature actually seen and realized by the artist, was used by the masters of impressionism with great artistic freedom. The special expressiveness of the texture of their paintings is not an end in itself, but a necessary way of expressing these creative aspirations. The Impressionists “sought to leave traces of how it was made in painting. They needed the viewer not to forget that he is on the verge between a mirror illusion and a canvas splattered with paints, writes M. V. Alpatov. “Only then will the 'miracle of art' take place before his very eyes.

The peculiar impression of the incompleteness of impressionist paintings, which so confused the contemporary viewer, is a consequence of their desire to capture ephemeralness, mobility, “inconsistency” visible world. Such freedom and artistry are largely deprived of the later works of the neo-impressionists (more precisely, divisionists) with their rational theory of color separation and neutralization of the artist's handwriting. The desire of the Impressionists to “paint in color”, the almost complete disappearance of lines (drawings) in some works, make it very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reproduce their painting in black and white.

The Impressionists were fundamentally opposed to any theorizing. According to Monet, art is “a free and sentimental interpretation of nature…theories cannot create pictures.” The so-called theory of impressionism came later; she was based on artistic discoveries masters of this trend, on their ability to see the world directly, intuitively, on the figurative, non-conceptual thinking inherent in impressionism. Impressionists' absolute confidence in their visual perception, their desire to write “only what they see, and the way they see”20 gave rise to a value-based new conventionality in art. And here it is appropriate to recall the words of Charles Baudelaire, said by him in 1859, on the threshold of emerging impressionism: “Sometimes the deliberately conditional turns out to be infinitely closer to the truth, and most of our landscape painters lies precisely because she tries to be too truthful.

However, as impressionism evolved, already from the end of the 1870s, the “obviously conditional” in it began to gravitate more and more towards decorativism: the gradual weakening of plastic moments in painting (space and volume), the assertion of a flat pictorial surface, the replacement of natural color vision with conditional tonal effects , "filtering" the colorful diversity of the depicted world, the division of the composition according to the principle of juxtaposing color zones - qualities that connect impressionism with some trends in the art of the turn of the century. And yet decorativeness never became the main principle of the impressionistic style, even in late period Monet's work: local "planar" color and linearity are alien to the very poetics of impressionism.

As already mentioned, impressionism did not appear suddenly. Many of his discoveries were prepared art of the 19th centuries, they seem to be floating in the air. Let us recall at least the amazing words that O. Balzac put into the mouth of the old artist from the story “The Unknown Masterpiece”: “Strictly speaking, the drawing does not exist! Don't laugh, young man... The line is a way by which a person is aware of the effect of lighting on the appearance of an object. But in nature, where everything is convex, there are no lines: only modeling creates a drawing, that is, the selection of an object in the environment where it exists. Only the distribution of light gives visibility to bodies!.. Isn't this how the sun, the divine painter of the world, works? O nature, nature! Who ever managed to catch your elusive form? Balzac created the story in 1830; at the same time, in the dynamic, colorful painting of E. Delacroix, in the romantic paintings of J. M. W. Turner, in the landscapes of R. P. Bonington and J. Constable with their ever-changing sky, what was later taken into service by the born impressionism. The immediate predecessors of Monet, C. Pissarro and A. Sisley include C. Corot, landscape painters of the Barbizon school (especially the most poetic of them - C. Daubigny), as well as Monet's future teachers E. Boudin and J. B. Jonkind.

And yet, impressionism was a fundamentally new word in European art. Now, viewed from a great time distance, he himself has acquired the character of a "classical" era french painting. However, one must not lose sight of the fact that impressionism in painting went through a rather complex evolution: a new artistic vision of the world crystallized gradually, individual (noted above) features of the poetics of impressionism had a relatively greater or lesser degree of significance in different time and various masters. Conventionally, the history of pictorial impressionism can be divided into periods of preparation (maturing of the new method) - the 1860s, heyday and struggle for new art - the 1870s, beginning in the 1880s, the crisis and creative differences (the last, 8th exhibition of the Impressionists 1886 coincided with the collapse of the group) and late - from the 1890s until the end of the life of Degas, Renoir, Monet.

In none of these periods of its development was impressionism an absolutely dominant trend in art. french art. Simultaneously with the young artists, J. O. D. Ingres, C. Corot, G. Courbet, J. F. Millet, representatives of the older generation, continued to work; the history of impressionism chronologically includes the entire history of the so-called post-impressionism (Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, also Seurat, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec). Almost simultaneously with Impressionism, symbolism was born in art; during the life of the oldest impressionists, the Fauvists appeared and the birth of cubism took place. That is why some aspects of impressionism are now much more clearly perceived in the mirror of contemporary and later trends in art: almost none of the significant French artists end of the 19th century. Creatively rethinking the lessons of impressionism and fundamentally rejecting much of it, these artists went further and laid the foundation for the art of our century.

In this "double perspective" of Impressionism, Claude Monet has a very prominent, but not exclusive place in the direction itself. Being primarily a landscape painter, he sought to restore the lost ideas about the unity of the world, where a person is inextricably linked with nature, with his environment. Monet discovered and brought to almost complete exhaustion some special qualities impressionistic perception of nature, the elements of light and air, in other words, the plein air side of impressionism, leaving other masters to develop other aspects of impressionist poetics.

Monet became the recognized leader of the Impressionists due to the exceptional qualities of his nature: strong-willed, energetic and purposeful, he was at the center of the struggle for new art, took an active part in organizing most of the exhibitions of artists in this direction, led the struggle for the posthumous recognition of the work of Edouard Manet. Always doubting his abilities and always searching, Monet, nevertheless, always knew how to cheer up his friends, inspire them with faith in their strength. Even for the incredulous, self-contained Cezanne, who had gone so far into later work from everyone, Monet remained the only authority, whose opinion he invariably listened to.

Svetlana Murina

The paradox of Monet's creativity

In two landscapes painted in Paris in a day national holiday On June 30, 1878, Monet seems to reveal to us the very process of creating a picture. He feverishly hurries to capture the spectacle that accidentally opened from the window - a sea of tricolor flags fluttering in the wind, the festive jubilation of the crowd.

The barely outlined verticals of the houses remind of the outlines of a street going into the distance, the drawing is completely dissolved in a whirlwind of saturated strokes of red, blue, and white. Monet's temperamental brush in these works anticipates the late Van Gogh, but how dissimilar is the excitement of the artist, captured by the beauty of the motif, from the inner turmoil that is read in the works of the Dutch master! Again, as in the landscape “Impression. Sunrise”, one can state the paradox of Monet’s creativity: the greater the spontaneity of perception, the artist’s trust in his eye and first sensation, the further he is from an objective perception of reality, the more deformed the subject of his image.

If the photographer had captured the view of the Rue Saint-Denis on the same day, then everything that is torn, fragmented, in the process of becoming, which is so striking in Monet's painting, would appear stopped, ordered and, perhaps, more prosaic. Monet least of all achieves the illusion of reality: through decomposition visual image into separate color elements, the emancipation of color separating from objects, the decoupling of the material world, he leads the viewer to a synthesis, a holistic perception of the depicted. This "suggestive transformation" of the image also requires from today's viewer, who is accustomed to many extremes in contemporary fine art, a special tension when getting acquainted with Monet's paintings.

In the autumn of 1878, Monet rented a house in the small town of Vetheuil near the capital. Here, together with him, his seriously ill wife and two children, the family of the bankrupt banker and collector Oshede settled. Camille Monet died in September 1879; V last time the artist paints her face, but this time Camilla's face eludes the artist, he is immersed in a restless sea of intersecting strokes of faded shades of purple, blue, yellow. Their light web is like a mysterious cover that separates life from death. Much later, Monet said to Georges Clemenceau: “Once, standing at the head of a deceased woman who had always been very dear to me, I caught myself looking at her tragic forehead, mechanically looking for traces of a consistently growing degradation of color that death caused on this motionless face. Shades of blue, yellow, gray - how do I know what! This is what I have come to ... This is how, under the influence of our inherent automatism, we first respond to the impact of color, and then our reflexes, regardless of our will, again include us in the unconscious process of a monotonously flowing life. Like cattle that turns a millstone.”

This recognition allows you to see the hidden drama of Monet's work. The artist was often and unfairly accused of dispassion, of the absolute predominance of optical perception over emotional. Meanwhile, the very aestheticization of the image in this case the image of death is a volitional act that transforms the initial motive impulse into an artistic experience. Feeling underlies Monet's work no less than visual impression; even in the serene contemplation of the late cycle of "water lilies" (we will talk about it below), notes of genuine elegiac poetry sound. The clear and optimistic mood of most of Monet's works is the side that faces the viewer, as well as the restrained, calm manner of the artist, which invariably attracted the sympathy of his contemporaries. For impressionist artists (primarily Monet and Renoir), such an internal dissonance between life and work is the innermost essence of their art, it must always be borne in mind: without this, the assessment of the work of the masters of impressionism becomes one-sided and simplified.

The painful experiences of Monet, which overshadowed the first year of his stay in Vetheus, were expressed with unexpected force in gloomy melancholy winter landscapes of this time (“Snow Effect at Vetheuil”, 1878, Louvre, Paris; “Entrance to Vetheuil”, 1879, Art Museum, Gothenburg) with their sense of loneliness and numbness. Financial situation Monet became especially difficult after the death of Camille, when he had the large family- his two young sons were brought up with the five children of Alice Oshede, who became their second mother (Monet's marriage to Alice was registered only in 1892). Only after the arrangement in 1880 of a small solo exhibition in the premises of the editorial office of the magazine La Vie Moderne, Monet, with the support of Durand-Ruel and the publisher Charpentier, gained confidence in his financial affairs. From now on, he was relieved of the worries of selling his works and could devote himself entirely to creativity.

Since the early 1880s, Monet's painting style has been gradually changing. He increasingly works in the studio; sometimes there appears in his paintings that “madeness” that can be considered a compromise between working on the first impression and the reflective consciousness of the artist working from memory. An example of this approach to creating a landscape is big picture"Lavacourt" (1880, Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas), intended for the Salon. Despite the fact that this landscape was extremely unsuccessfully placed in the exhibition (at a height of almost six meters from the floor, in a close environment of other works - such an absurd hanging of paintings has always been practiced in the Salons), it was noted by critics. One of them (Chennevière) even wrote that "the bright and clear atmosphere made all other neighboring landscapes appear black in this gallery of the Salon." However, by this time, impressionism had already won a firm place - at least in the minds of critics.

Even such a principled “subverser” of Monet, as the famous symbolist writer J.C. Huysmans, changed his attitude towards the artist after the seventh exhibition of the Impressionists (1882): “How truthful his foam is on the waves falling into a ray of light, the rivers shimmering in thousands shades of objects that they reflect; in his canvases, the cold breath of the sea resembles the fluttering of leaves, the light rustle of grass ... it is to him and his fellow impressionists, masters of the landscape, that we should be grateful for the revival of the art of painting. Messrs. Pissarro and Monet finally emerged victorious from a hard struggle. It can be said that in their canvases the complex problem of light is resolved ... ".

Huysmans' characterization can be attributed to that stage of Monet's work, which the artist himself considered to have passed. The search for new themes and images leads him to create a whole cycle of still lifes, executed in the early 1880s; like the landscape, this genre was Monet's favorite area of \u200b\u200bcreativity. "Flapjacks" (1882, private collection, Paris) is an example of a typical impressionistic composition, where the connection between objects and even their location seem random (some are cut off by the edge of the frame). Seen from a close distance, this fragment of inanimate nature is perceived as a landscape with an unexpressed clearly (and therefore infinite) depth, where a white tablecloth with cold blue reflections looks like a snow-covered space. The best of the still lifes of this time are images of flowers and fruits. Their decorative linearity, inscribed in a narrow vertical format (“Dahlias” and “White Poppy”, 1883, private collections), anticipate the birth of Art Nouveau (Art Nouveau) in French art.

In the 1880s, Monet quite often turned to a "pure" portrait - usually a bust image on a neutral background. Monet was not a master psychological portrait in the sense of the word that is applicable to E. Manet or E. Degas. It would be more accurate to say that he never sought to cross the line that would lead to penetration into inner world another man. Monet's portraits characterize, first of all, his own inner isolation and emotional restraint; he endows those portrayed with his mood, and this gives them a shade of cold aloofness. Models of Monet's portraits are inevitably immersed in themselves, they are inactive (despite the liveliness of the artist's brush), disconnected from environment and seem to be in an immaterial world. An excellent example of such autocharacteristics is "Self-Portrait in a Beret" (1886, private collection, Paris).

Oscar Claude Monet (French Oscar-Claude Monet; November 14, 1840 (18401114), Paris - December 5, 1926, Giverny) - French painter, one of the founders of impressionism.

Oscar Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris. When the boy was five years old, the family moved to Normandy, to Le Havre. The father wanted Claude to become a grocer and continue the family business. Monet's youth, as he himself later noted, was essentially the youth of a vagabond. He spent more time in the water and on the rocks than in class. School to him, by nature undisciplined, always seemed like a prison. He amused himself by painting the blue covers of notebooks and using them for portraits of his teachers, made in a very irreverent, caricature manner, and in this game he soon reached perfection. At fifteen, Monet was known throughout Le Havre as a caricaturist. He had so established his reputation that he was besieged from all sides with requests to make caricature portraits. The abundance of such orders and the lack of generosity of his parents inspired him with a bold decision that shocked his family: Monet took twenty francs for his portraits.

Having gained some fame in this way, Monet soon became an "important person" in the city. In the window of the only shop for art supplies, his cartoons proudly showed off, displayed five or six in a row, and when he saw the onlookers crowding in admiration in front of them, he "was ready to burst with pride." Often in the window of the same shop, Monet saw placed above his own works seascapes which he, like most of his fellow citizens, considered "disgusting". The author of the landscapes, which inspired him with "extreme disgust", was Eugene Boudin, and, not yet knowing this man, he hated him. He refused to get acquainted with him through the owner of the shop, but one day, going into it, he did not notice that Boudin was in the back half. The owner of the shop took the opportunity to introduce Monet to him as young man who has such a great talent for caricature.

“Boudin immediately approached me,” Monet recalled, “praised me in his soft voice and said: I always look at your drawings with pleasure; it's fun, easy, smart. You are talented - you can see it at first sight, but I hope you don't stop there. All this is very good for a start, but soon you will get tired of the caricature. Study, learn to see, write and draw, make landscapes. The sea and sky, animals, people and trees are so beautiful exactly in the form in which nature created them, with all their qualities, in their true being, such as they are, surrounded by air and light.

But, Monet himself admitted, Boudin's appeals had no effect. Ultimately, Monet liked this man. He was convinced, sincere, but Monet could not digest his painting, and when Boudin invited him to work in the open air with him, Monet always found a reason to politely refuse. Summer has come; Monet, tired of resisting, finally gave up, and Boudin willingly took up his training. “My eyes were finally opened,” Monet recalled, “I truly understood nature and at the same time learned to love it.”

Seventeen-year-old Oscar Monet could not find a better teacher, because Boudin was neither a doctrinaire nor a theoretician. He had a receptive eye, a clear mind and was able to convey his observations and experiences in simple words. “Everything that is written directly on the spot,” he declared, for example, “is always distinguished by strength, expressiveness, liveliness of the brushstroke, which you will not achieve later in the workshop.” He also considered it necessary to "show extreme persistence in preserving the first impression, since it is the most correct", and at the same time insisted that "in the picture, not one part, but the whole should strike."

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Oscar Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the prominent representatives French (and therefore world) impressionism, co-founder and theorist of this direction, who remained faithful to him until the end of his life. Monet's pictorial style, which later became classic for Impressionism, was characterized by writing with separate strokes of pure color, which made it possible to create rich lighting effects and convey the features of the light-air environment.

BIOGRAPHY OF CLAUD MONET

Claude Oscar Monet was born on February 14, 1840 in Paris. When the boy was five years old, the family went to Normandy, to Le Havre. Against his father's wishes to become a grocer, Claude young years had a craving for painting and enjoyed drawing caricatures. On the sunny beaches of France, Claude Monet met Eugene Boudin, famous landscape painter and one of the forerunners of impressionism. Boudin showed young Monet some tricks painting work from nature. In 1860, Claude Monet was called to military service and leaves for Algeria, but served a little less than two years out of the prescribed seven-year term: he fell ill with typhus, which helped the artist to demobilize.

Monet entered the university at the Faculty of Arts, but became disillusioned with the approach to painting present there. leaving educational institution, he entered the painting studio, which was organized by Charles Gleyre. There he makes acquaintance with Renoir, Frederic Bazille and Alfred Sisley. They were practically peers, held similar views on painting and became the basis of the Impressionist painters. At the Academy of Suissa, Claude Monet met Pissarro and Cezanne. significant role in the work of Claude Monet had a job in Bougival, where he created the pub "La Grenouille" with Auguste Renoir. The paintings created by these artists marked the birth of a new artistic direction - impressionism.

THE CREATIVITY OF CLAUD MONET

In 1866, Claude Monet creates a portrait of Camille Donsier. Later, Camilla became the wife of the artist, they had a son, Jean.

The first significant work was for Claude Monet "Breakfast on the Grass" (1865-1866), written by him after the painting of the same name by Edouard Manet. The work itself has not reached us: the artist paid her off the debt for living in the village of Shayi, in the vicinity of which he worked. The plot of the picture is simple: on the edge of a green forest, several men and elegantly dressed women. The feeling of air movement is enhanced by the texture of the canvas: it is no longer smooth, but consists of individual spots-strokes. Having finished "Breakfast on the Grass", Claude perfects the method he discovered in various studies that he creates in the "Froggy" - a favorite vacation spot of the Parisians of that period. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Monet lives in London, where he met Durand-Ruel. In England, he got acquainted with the works of John Constable and William Turner.

Portrait of Camille Doncieux Breakfast on the Grass Frog

The return from England will mark one of the most fruitful periods of Claude Monet's work. He writes his best paintings- "Field of poppies at Argenteuil", "Boulevard des Capucines", "Lilacs in the sun", "Impression. Sunrise". In 1874, these paintings were shown at the exhibition at the "Anonymous Society of Painters, Artists and Engravers", the organizer and leader of this was Claude Monet. After this exhibition, by the way, named after Monet's painting “Impression. Sunrise", the nickname "impressionists" (from the French impression - impression) "stuck" to the artists. These were the golden years of the heyday of impressionism. Monet participated in many exhibitions. However, the works of Claude Monet are practically not sold. Driven by poverty, occasionally interrupted by sold paintings, Claude Monet lives where the wallet allows: in Argenteuil, in Vetheuil, in Poissy and the rest of his life in Giverny.

In the works of that period, the perception of the integrity of what is happening around momentary events is clearly visible.

Having settled in Argenteuil, Claude Monet writes with passion to the Seine, the surroundings, bridges, sailboats. In the end, he builds a boat and sails in it to Rouen and there, terribly amazed by what he saw, depicts in sketches the surroundings of the city and ships entering the harbor (“Argenteuil”, “Sailboat in Argenteuil”). In 1877, a series of paintings appeared from under the brush of Claude Monet (they represent the Saint-Lazare railway station), which marked new stage in the work of the great artist: the transition from the general concept of the study to an analytical approach to the depicted ("Gare Saint-Lazare").

Argenteuil Sailing boat in Argenteuil Gare Saint-Lazare

The change in the artist's painting style is accompanied by changes in his life. His wife Camille is seriously ill. With the birth of a second child, the poverty in which the family lives increases.

In 1879, his first wife, Camilla, died of tuberculosis. In 1892, Claude Monet marries for the second time, Alice Hoschede. Previously, prior to this, Alice ran the household and raised the children from Claude's first marriage. In 1883, Claude Monet and his wife moved to Giverny, located near Paris. Alice died in 1911, but Claude Monet had to deal with the death of his eldest son Jean in 1914 as well.

In the late 80s, his art increasingly attracted the public and critics. Recognition brings material success. Soon the financial affairs of Claude Monet improved so much that he was able to buy a house in Giverny, where he lived until the end of his days. During this period, the artist is completely focused on working on a series of landscapes, in which he puts the finest lighting effects "at the edge of the corner." He begins to relate to color differently, and the plots of his paintings also change. All Monet's attention is focused on the expressiveness of the amazing colors smear in isolation from subject correlation. The desire for decorativeness is intensifying, which ultimately resulted in the creation of panel paintings. In place of simple plot paintings of 1860-1870, more complex ones come, rich in all kinds of associative connections (“Rocks in Belle-Ile”, “Poplars”).

Irises at Giverny Weeping willows White water lilies

Claude Monet is interested in serial compositions: Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, views of London. In them, following the impressionistic manner, Claude Monet conveys the unequal degree of illumination of objects in different weather, at different times of the day and night, using a surprisingly diverse palette of tones. A series of paintings allow you to create a variety of decorative compositions, as if developing in time and space due to the emerging associative links. In Giverny, Claude Monet spends the lion's share of his time in the garden, doing his artistic organization. This fantastic work has led to a change everyday world, inhabited by living people, into a mysterious, fantasy world water and aquatic plants ("Irises at Giverny", "Weeping Willows"). Therefore, it is no coincidence that in the most famous series of his last panels, views of various ponds with water lilies floating in them (“White Water Lilies”) are presented.

The term "Impressionism" appeared thanks to Monet's painting "Impression. The Rising Sun”, which was exhibited at the first major exhibition of the Impressionists, in the studio of the photographer Nadar in the spring of 1874, and was called the “Rebel Exhibition”. In total, the exhibition featured 165 works by thirty artists. It is worth noting that at that time the still lifes and landscapes of Monet and his associates were accused of rebellious moods, immorality and failure. Scourge of the exhibition, the little-known journalist Louis Leroy, in his article in the magazine "Le Charivari", dismissively called the artists "impressionists". From the challenge, the artists accepted this epithet. Over time, it has lost its original negative meaning.

It's interesting that the best work from impressionism in painting, they also consider the painting by Claude Monet. And this despite the fact that by the time the artist began to paint the famous "Water Lilies", he was already losing his sight.

If you look closely at the women in the paintings of Claude Monet, there will definitely be Camille Domcus, his favorite model and wife. She posed for him for many canvases, including such well-known ones as "The Lady in Green", "Women in the Garden", "Madame Monet with her son", "Portrait of Claude Monet's wife on the sofa." Madame Monet gave birth to two sons to the artist (the first child even before the official marriage). However, the birth of her second child weakened her health, and soon after the second birth, she died. Claude Monet painted a posthumous portrait of his wife.

The painting "Pond with water lilies" or, as this canvas is also called - "Pond with water lilies", painted by Monet in 1919, is the most expensive painting by this master. In 2008, at Christie`s auction in London, this painting was sold for fabulous money - $ 80 million. Today, The Water Lily Pond ranks ninth in the ranking of the most expensive paintings in the world sold at auction. It is not known who bought this painting and where it is now. As a rule, private collectors, acquiring similar works prefer to remain anonymous.

Famous quotes by Claude Monet:

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it was necessary when you just need to love.
Anyone who claims to have finished the canvas is terribly arrogant.
My work is always better when I'm alone and follow my own impressions. Color is my one-day obsession, joy and suffering.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.
To draw the sea really well, you have to look at it every hour, every day in the same place, so you can understand how you have to work in that particular place, which is why I work on the same subjects over and over and over again. over and over, four or even six times.
Try to forget about what you see in front of you, about a tree, a house, a field, anything. Just think that there is a small blue square here, an oblong pink figure there, and continue until you have a naive impression of the picture that is in front of your eyes.
I only think about my painting, and if I had to leave it, I think I would go crazy.

Claude Monet is in the top 3 most dear artists peace

Claude Monet, after open auctions, until 2013, ranked third in the ranking of the most expensive artists in the world. In total, 208 of his works were sold at auction for a total of $ 1,622.200 million. The average cost of one painting by Monet is $ 7.799 million. expensive paintings Monet consider:

Water Lilies (1905) - $43 million
Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1873) - $41 million
Water Lilies (1904) - $36 million
"Waterloo Bridge. Cloudy "(1904) - $ 35 million.
Path to the Pond (1900) — $32 million
Water Lily Pond (1917) - $24 million
Poplars (1891) — $22 million
"Houses of Parliament. sunlight in the fog "(1904) - $ 20 million.
Parliament, Sunset (1904) - $14 million

Today, the artist's works are "scattered" around the world. The largest countries-owners of Monet's paintings are Russia, the USA and Great Britain. However, you can find the artist's paintings in many other museums, both in Europe and abroad. Several paintings by Claude Monet are even in museums in New Zealand. A significant part of the artist's works belongs to private collections, therefore these paintings are closed to the general public. Only sometimes once acquired works are again returned from the hands of collectors to museums or end up at auctions.

In Russia, at the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin are such famous paintings, as "Lilacs in the Sun" in 1873 and "Breakfast on the Grass" in 1866. The painting "Parliament, the effect of fog" is in St. Petersburg in the Hermitage. Several works by Claude Monet are kept in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay. Many works are in the United States, in the "Metropolitan Museum" of New York, in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, as well as in the Museum of Art, located in Philadelphia. In London, Monet's paintings are exhibited at the National Gallery.

Paintings by Claude Monet have repeatedly become objects of desire for criminals. A fact is known when the thief of Monet's painting "The Beach at Pourville", which was exhibited in National Museum Poland, laughed at the employees, cutting out famous masterpiece out of the frame, and instead inserted an inferior reproduction. We noticed the substitution on September 19, and when exactly the theft occurred, it remained unknown. The culprit turned out to be a 41-year-old man, and the stolen painting was found in his house.

In October 2012, the Kunstel Museum in Rotterdam was robbed. 7 masterpieces were stolen, among which was the famous "Waterloo Bridge" by Claude Monet. This robbery was the largest in 20 years. After an investigation, experts suspect that the stolen paintings may have been burned.

Beach at Pourville Waterloo Bridge Poppy Field

Claude Monet was born 173 years ago, his paintings are on the crest of popularity today, and especially ardent and talented fans of impressionism dedicate their creations to him. An example of this is the installation "Poppy Field" by Claude Cormier, inspired by the paintings of Claude Monet.

A crater on Mercury is named after Monet.

The English writer Eva Figes in her novel The Light describes one day in the life of Claude Monet - from dawn to dusk.

The restaurant that appears in the TV series "Kitchen" is called "Claude Monet" (Claude Monet) - this is the current Moscow restaurant "Champagne Life".

In the movie Titanic (1997) we can also see Monet's painting "Water Lilies".

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. K. Monet // Album. - L., 1969.
Georgievskaya E. B. K. Monet // Album - 2nd ed. - M., 1974.
Bohemian K. G. K. Monet. - M., 1984.
Rewald J. History of Impressionism. - M., 1994.
Kulakov V. A. Claude Monet [Album]. - M., 1989.
Thailandier I. Claude Monet [Album]. - M., 1995.
Cit.: Letters, trans. from French // foreword. and approx. N. V. Yavorskaya, in the book: Masters of Art about Art, vol. 5, book. 1. - M., 1969.
Reuterswerd O. Claude Monet, [transl. from Swedish] - M., 1965.
Hoschedé J.P. Claude Monet, ce mal connu, v. 1-2, Gen., 1960.
Forge A. Monet. Chicago, 1995.
Wildenstein D. Claude Monet.Claude Monet. Koeln: 2007. Tashen GmbH.

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