Recording Nature and Light   Image: Impressions: soleil levant (Impression: Sunrise), Claude Monet, 1872

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was the leader of the Impressionist group and, more than anyone, the creator of Impressionist painting. He was very unlike Manet in social background, upbringing, taste, and character. He appears to have been quite uninterested in the art of the past and regarded all theories about art with horror. His prime concern was the recording of his visual sensations; his only desire, in his own words, was "to paint directly from nature, striving to render my impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects."

Monet began by tackling the problem, which had defeated Courbet, of painting figures in a convincing open-air setting. He would have thought Manet's solution, in Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, too composed and too confusedly lighted. Monet observed that light alone has the power of unifying figure and landscape. So he experimented by painting Women in the Garden out-of-doors and only when the sun was shining through the trees. This was the first picture faithfully to record the effect of outdoor light on the figure. Monet's new awareness of light was to transform painting. In spirit he worked in the succession of Courbet, trying to put on his canvas what he saw and no more. But as he soon discovered, the simpler the painter's aims, the more complicated and difficult his task becomes. During his long career - he lived to be eighty-six - Monet reduced painting to its bare essentials. He began by observing effects of light that earlier artists had never altogether succeeded in catching, particularly the reflection of the sky on the surface of water and the play of bright sunshine on water and on snow. Guided always by the evidence of his eyes, he noticed that shadows are not brown, but colored, and that things change their colors when placed in different positions or lights. In order to record what he saw, Monet found himself employing much brighter pigments than any he had used before. Whenever possible he worked with pure, unmixed colors, the three primaries and their three complementaries. Blacks, browns, and earth shades soon disappear from his pictures. As a result of this new use of color and because he wanted to reproduce the feeling of movement of quivering light, Monet's handling of paint became very free and loose; he made no attempt to disguise his brush-strokes. His works therefore looked to his contemporaries incomplete and unfinished. In 1872 he had used the word "impression" for the title of a picture, and the term "Impressionist" was now taken up and applied to all work of the same kind. By the end of the 1870's Impressionism was an established style of painting. Monet had not been alone in his researches: among his close friends were Frederic Bazille, who met a premature death in the Franco-Prussian war; the Englishman Alfred Sisley, who represented the link with Constable and Turner; and, most important, Auguste Renoir, who pioneered the lighter, brighter colors even before Monet. Renoir, however, did not share what soon became Monet's exclusive interest, landscape. He enjoyed painting pretty girls, and his art, like that of Manet and Degas, reflects the activities of the smart Parisian society of the day. The general air of delight and gaiety that surrounds much Impressionist painting, belying the artist's material circumstances, was due in large measure to Renoir. Monet and his friends joined forces with other young artists who were at odds with the Salon establishment and wanted to show their work to the public. It was thus that the exhibitions of the independent group began, in 1874. These exhibitions were later called Impressionist, but the term fits the work of Monet and Renoir better than it does that of Degas, Pissarro, or Cezanne, the other leading figures in the group.

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