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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Impressionism- A beginner's guide to Impressionism
- What does “Impressionism” mean?
- How the Impressionists got their name
- Impressionist color
- Impressionist pictorial space
- Japonisme
- Degas, The Bellelli Family
- Degas, At the Races in the Countryside
- Degas, The Dance Class
- Degas, Visit to a Museum
- Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers
- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Caillebotte, Man at his Bath
- Morisot, The Cradle
- A summer day in Paris: Morisot's Hunting Butterflies
- Cassatt, In the Loge
- Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
- Cassatt, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge
- Cassatt, The Loge
- Cassatt, The Child's Bath
- Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed
- How to recognize Monet: The Basin at Argenteuil
- Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, Cliff Walk at Pourville
- Monet's Wheatstacks (Snow Effect, Morning): Getty conversations
- Monet, Poplars
- Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series
- Monet, Water Lilies
- How to Recognize Renoir: The Swing
- Renoir, La Loge
- Renoir, The Grands Boulevards
- Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Charpentier and Her Children
- Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
- Renoir, The Large Bathers
- Impressionism
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Monet, Water Lilies
Claude Monet, Les Nymphéas (The Water Lilies), suite of paintings on permanent exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris: Room 1: Morning, oil on two canvas panels, 200 x 425 cm, c. 1918-26 Clouds, oil on three canvas panels, 200 x 1275 cm, c. 1918-26 Green Highlights, oil on two canvas panels, 200 x 850 cm, c. 1918-26 Sunset, oil on canvas, 200 x 600 cm, c. 1918-26 Room 2: Reflection of Trees, oil on two canvas panels, 200 x 850 cm, c. 1918-26 The Morning Light, the willows, oil on three canvas panels, 200 x 1275 cm, c. 1918-26 The Morning Willows, oil on three canvas panels, 200 x 1275 cm, c. 1918-26 The Two Willows, oil on four canvas panels, 200 x 1700 cm, c. 1918-26 Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- How many Water Lillies did Monet paint?(15 votes)
- I know I'm a little late to answer the question.... but Monet painted just over 250 Water Lilly paintings! How cool!(1 vote)
- Were they painted concave or adapted for the room?(7 votes)
- Here is a link to a picture of Monet in his atelier in Giverny where he painted the Nympheas:
http://fondation-monet.com/fr/wp-content/themes/monet/img/visuel-atelier_nympheas.png
The paintings were not painted concave per se, but on separate (albeit large) canvases. If you have a chance to go to the Orangerie Museum you'll be able to enjoy them but also see the canvases up close and the different places where they are put together to create these large panels.
Moreover, Monet was a friend of Georges Clemenceau, one of France's great political figures. Clemenceau commissioned the paintings and gave Monet that space at the Orangerie (It might not be clear in the video, but there are two separate elliptical rooms).
Monet was clever. He was happy that France had basically given him a museum. But he was scared that later in time the museum might be repurposed and the paintings moved somewhere else. So he asked for the paintings to be glued to the wall. Even today, you cannot remove them from there.
A few years back, the museum was completely renovated and the workers had to take numerous precautions to make sure the paintings would not suffer from the renovation.(15 votes)
- How was Monet able to create a canvas that size? Are there vertical strips of canvas somehow ties together, or was the canvas something like a roll that was pulled out.(5 votes)
- Wouldn't it be amazing if the seats revolved!(5 votes)
- The concept of this exposition, of a whole museum that has been designed according to Monet's requests to display his paintings in the exact way he envisioned them, is particularly interesting to me. Are there more art exhibitions with a similar concept in the world?(3 votes)
- The layered paint idea, the way Monet did this piece over such a long period of time, inspires me a lot. I almost want to see what I could do, with a method like that. Just... painting when I can, and adding and adding and adding for who knows how long.
The sculptural qualities of the lilies just really pulls me in. Up close, it's like looking at something abstract, but still incredibly beautiful, lush, and complete in it's own way. Even though I don't particularly like abstract formats of art, usually. I guess it's the colours, partly, working with each other and layers over each other.(3 votes) - I really want to go see this in person, but I wonder if I'd manage to get teary-eyed. The sense of "home" I get from a lot of the lush, bright, pink pieces that Monet has painted is an almost overwhelming feeling sometimes.
Being able to get close to some of his work, and to see in person the bright colours and luscious, dreamy patterns and lines that make up his work? I don't know how I'd react to it. I think I'd have to bring something to draw with. I might not be a master artists, but master artists tend to inspire a deep and abiding need to create and make and be creative. At least, in me?(2 votes) - Are there other artists who have used impressionism before Monet?(1 vote)
- Monet is perhaps the most famous of the Impressionist painters. While the movement takes its name from one of his paintings, he was not the first to paint in a style that would become known as Impressionism. He would, however, become the most famous of the impressionist painters. His work helped define the movement, and he became one of its leading figures.
Monet, along with other artists, would gather at cafés in Paris to discuss painting. At Café Guerbois Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne met with the older Manet. It was here that the young artists founded the Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. This group decided the only way to show their work was to put on their own exhibitions. https://www.cmonetgallery.com/father-of-impressionism.aspx(2 votes)
- Did someone pay for this painting to be made?(1 vote)
- It seems not so much that someone paid for it to be made as that Monet made the painting and then someone paid money to buy it. He was represented by a gallery, which sold the stuff he did. See: http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/educational-files/rodin-and-monet(1 vote)
- did someone buy this painting from Monet?(1 vote)
- Monet likely consigned the painting to a gallery (an art dealer) who sold it, took a cut of the proceeds, and gave the rest to the artist. See: http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/educational-files/rodin-and-monet(1 vote)
Video transcript
(piano music playing) Voiceover: We're at the
l'Orangerie in Paris and we're looking at one of
Monet's Water Lily rooms. Voiceover: It's in an
oval shape lit from above. Voiceover: Through a scrim which
gives it a really lovely soft light. There is this sense that
these are contemplative works which ties them in an interesting
way as to a kind of solemnity of the sort that you would
expect in a religious context. Voiceover: No doubt, this is
painted late in Monet's life. after the death of his wife
and after the death of his son. So, I think there is a
sense for him of his legacy. Voiceover: He gave them
to the French state and the state in turn decided
to build this pavilion for them. Voiceover: I keep thinking
about Monet's lifelong desire to capture the beauty of the optical world from when he was in Paris
and then in Argenteuil and thinking back to the
Boulevard des Capucines and the light flooding
down the boulevards, to the Gare Saint Lazare and the light filter through
the steam of the trains and then later in his life, in
his garden with the water lilies. Voiceover: He was interested not
only in capturing and understanding and rendering those effects
of light and the momentary but actually in creating them. You know, he devoted an
enormous amount of his life to actually planting these
gardens and maintaining them and then translating them onto canvas and in the sense preserving
that sense of the momentary. Voiceover: The thing that I keep
thinking about as we look at this and the intensity of the color and
the beauty of the color harmony is that the paintings are
more beautiful than reality. So, let's think about that for a second
in the history of landscape painting. I mean, these are
unprecedented in that way. First of all their shape is this very,
very long panels without a horizon line. Voiceover: Right, we're looking
across the waters so we see neither the ground we stand on
nor the horizon on the far side. Voiceover: Traditional landscape
painting often provided a path for one's eye to travel
through a landscape and here we really can't do
that because we're confronted with the surface of the water, the surface of the paintings themselves. Voiceover: But I do think that
Monet is borrowing actually from the classical tradition
of landscape painting. If you look on both the
sides of these canvases you see the dark shadows
of the weeping willows and those function in a sense the way
trees often framed recessionary landscapes by Claude or by [unintelligble]. Monet has placed us in
a very particular place. Obviously we're on the shore in some way but we're looking across
the waters so that we see neither the ground that we stand on nor the horizon on the far side. Now, Monet had just enlarged his ponds but even then they're quite small. And so, he's really unmoored us by
not giving us ground to stand on. But he has given us a
very particular angle at which we're viewing the pads
and the water lilies themselves and that does place us in relationship
to the surface of the water. And so we actually can locate ourselves and they also allow us to
sort of hop, skip and jump from pad to pad and move back into space. And then this extraordinary
volume of space below the pond and the incredible dome of space above where those towering
clouds right above us. And so this sense of the extent
of the volume that's portrayed and yet done so on the
2-dimensional surface of the pond which is of course a reflection of the
2-dimensional surface of the canvas is a beautiful through
summation of this notion that Monet has worked towards for so long. How does one capture both
the abstraction of modern art and yet also still make room for
the volume that our eye knows? Voiceover: There's something
really sublime here. We have the infinity of that depth and there's also a sense of the
infinite in the sky and the clouds and that speaks back to
that religious sense. While he's capturing the transitory there's a sense of permanence and
transcendence at the same time. Voiceover: I think that's actually
a perfect way to state it. Let's take a really
close look at the paint. The surface is incredibly
rich and rough and built up. You can see this kind of dry brush that Monet has sort of
hold the paint across. And what seems to happen is the
paint comes off on the ridges that are already there making
those even more prominent. Voiceover: Well, it's almost
as a sculptural surface that helps to create some senses
of volume as you look across it. Toward late in his career he wasn't so
interested in capturing things quickly. He wanted to be able
to return to a painting and continue to work it. He's finding a solution to that problem and creating a studio out of doors where he can continue to work the surface and so, it does have
that feeling of something that has layers and layers of paint
where the paint has been allowed to dry and then he's put on new layers. Voiceover: When we stand
close to this canvas and we see those layers of paint and we see the way they almost
like a tapestry lie over each other so that we can see the
paint between strokes and the colors are not so
much blended as overlaid. Voiceover: It's hard not to
think about all of repainting and Jackson Pollock, the way that the
painting occupies our field of vision and how did he escape that field of
vision in order to paint the landscape. You can almost imagine this
way that the painting becomes as I think it is for Jackson
Pollock, a world unto itself that the artist enters and exists within. And we do too actually within
this space of this room. Voiceover: Well, that's a
really critical point, you know? What begins to happen with the
early modern certainly with Matisse and Picasso and ultimately I
think with people like Pollock and maybe here too is the
conversation ceases to be a dialogue between the artist and its subject and becomes ultimately a dialogue
between the artist and the canvas. And that seems to have happened here. It's a beautiful result. (piano music playing)