The (Eventual) Triumph of Claude Monet
The (Eventual) Triumph of Claude Monet
"P.S. I was so upset yesterday that I made the blunder of throwing myself into the water. Fortunately, there were no bad results."
This essay is part of an ongoing series celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition, which debuted in Paris in 1874. If you’d like to read other essays on the history of Impressionism, you can do so here.
An emerald Japanese bridge hovers over a pond of water lilies. The sunshine of midsummer is an artist in itself, painting the water in an iridescent glow that reveals its underlying greens and blues. The branches of a weeping willow slouch above the banks, and the image calls to mind an elegant lady of the Belle Époque, lounging outdoors in her green dress and parasol. She has no better place to be.
Claude Monet’s water lilies are a familiar sight to art lovers around the world. In his later years, the pond was a frequent muse to the artist, as were the surrounding gardens at his house in Giverny, France. Giverny is a picturesque village that lies on the banks of the river Seine in Normandy. When a 43-year-old Monet first arrived in 1883 at the house he would make famous, the property was in need of restoration and the gardens were ripe for expansion.
Today, Monet’s house receives about half a million visitors per year. A mere glance would swiftly reveal that the property is an artist’s home—the exterior walls are a rich salmon pink with bright green shutters, the kitchen is covered in blue and white decorative tiles, and the dining room is a sunny yellow. During the 1970s, thanks to donations from around the world, the Fondation Monet was able to restore the house to its former glory, offering visitors a chance to experience the place as Monet intended.1
Giverny was also the site of some of Monet’s greatest works. Here, he embraced the series as a way to capture the quality of light and color in a given setting as the seasons changed. His beloved garden featured prominently in his art, including his Water Lilies series as well as In the Garden (1895) and The Artist’s Garden at Giverny (1900). The farms that surrounded the village also inspired Monet’s Haystacks series, in which his preoccupation with depicting the shifting sunlight over various seasons especially stands out.
Monet spent 43 years in Giverny, first as a renter and eventually as the home’s owner. It was where he raised his family with his second wife, Alice Hoschedé, with whom Monet had an affair and later married after both of their spouses had died. (In a bizarre twist, Alice moved in with Monet’s family as his first wife, Camille, was dying of cancer. Alice nursed Camille in the last year of her life and negotiated with a local priest to ensure that Camille received her last sacraments; the priest relented, in spite of the fact that Camille conceived her first child outside of marriage. Yet in another twist, Alice worked to destroy all evidence of Camille after her passing, including letters and photographs. As is sometimes the case with artists and their associates, the whole thing was an absolute soap opera.)2
It was in the latter half of his life that Monet achieved financial success. Once reviled by critics for his radical Impressionist art, he became the toast of the art world. The journey to that place wasn’t always pretty, and certainly, nowhere near as lovely as his paintings.
Overnight success is rare for artists, and usually, what appears to be an “overnight success” is actually a decade of toiling away in obscurity before finally landing one’s big break. In the case of Monet, his journey was a slow burn: his triumph at Giverny was preceded by years of painfully gradual progress amidst rejection and financial troubles.
In my previous essay on the First Impressionist Exhibition, we explored how the movement got off to a rocky start—the Impressionists shocked the Parisian public with their rejection of academic art. The Impressionists’ paintings appeared unfinished and lacked the conventions of perspective, precise detail, and traditional subject matter that the growing bourgeoisie of Haussmann’s Paris had come to expect. Like the Realists, they also painted ordinary people, even (gasp!) working class people like bartenders and ballerinas.
Prior to that exhibition, Monet was able to place a few paintings at the coveted Salon des Beaux-Arts, including La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide (1865), Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur (1865), and The Woman in the Green Dress (1866).3 He was in his mid-twenties, and with these early victories at the Salon, he seemed poised for success. But Monet grew to resent the stiffness of academic art and longed to paint en plein air, to capture fleeting moments of life and scenes of nature in a rapidly industrializing world. As he pioneered this new, radical style of painting that would later become known as Impressionism, he struggled to get past the old-fashioned jury at the Salon.
To make matters worse, Monet had lost his father’s approval. Claude Monet Sr. was a merchant and grocer in Le Havre, Normandy, and he had hoped his son would follow in his footsteps. The younger Claude not only seemed incapable of following the standards of the Salon and Académie des Beaux-Arts, but his then-mistress, Camille, was pregnant. In the eyes of his father, the young Claude was a disgrace. His father swiftly cut off financial support, right as the artist’s career seemed to be floundering. And, as we’ve already explored, the First Impressionist Exhibition was a failure. What was Monet to do?
A year after the birth of his son Jean, Monet wrote a letter4 to his friend and fellow Impressionist, Frédéric Bazille, which clearly reveals Monet’s fragile mental state at the time:
June 29, 1868
I am writing to you a few hasty words to ask your help very quickly. I was certainly born beneath an unlucky star. I was just thrown out of the inn, naked as the day I was born. I found a place to shelter Camille and my poor little Jean in the country for a few days. I am leaving for Le Havre tonight to try to get something out of my art lover. My family no longer wants anything for us. I still don’t know where I am going to sleep tomorrow. Your very disturbed friend.
Claude Monet
P.S. I was so upset yesterday that I made the blunder of throwing myself into the water. Fortunately, there were no bad results.
While the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 was an utter disappointment to the artists involved, it did help in one crucial area: now, people knew who they were. The Impressionists exhibited again in 1876 and 1877. By the Third Impressionist Exhibition, critics were changing their tune. It seems that enough exposure to their art helped the stuffy establishment to slowly come around, and finally, Monet was receiving a bit of praise from critics. Sales of his work improved, and by the time he discovered the little village of Giverny in 1883, he would be showcasing his first major retrospective that same year.
Before even the First Impressionist Exhibition, an art dealer by the name of Paul Durand-Ruel had taken an interest in the Impressionists, and for a long time, he was their most loyal buyer. Making only menial progress in the Parisian market, Durand-Ruel had the foresight to pack up his growing collection of Impressionist paintings and ship them to New York in 1886.5
Monet was furious. New York had yet to become the great art city that it is today, and as far as Monet was concerned, Durand-Ruel may as well have thrown the paintings into the Atlantic Ocean. “If you take them to America,” Monet complained at the time, “it’s me who’s going to be losing out over here.”6
But Durand-Ruel suspected that an American audience would be more open-minded than their Parisian counterparts, and luckily for the Impressionists, he was right. American viewers (and critics) were perplexed yet curious about this new crop of artists, and they were particularly interested in the works of Claude Monet. Over the next few years, Durand-Ruel opened galleries in New York to better showcase the art, and sales picked up. He changed the fortunes of his artists, such that by the 1890s, Monet was able to sell his Water Lilies and Haystacks at much higher prices. When he passed away in December of 1926, Monet died a rich man.7
Claude Monet’s story is one of persistence. He possessed an extraordinary work ethic, producing over 2,000 paintings in his lifetime, and he stayed true to his vision despite the fact that his family, the artistic establishment, and countless critics doubted him. Even as his eyesight began to fail him in his later years, he refused to give up painting. All the while, his gardens at Giverny remained a fruitful source of inspiration.
I find Monet’s story moving because our culture often elevates youth at the expense of experience, yet in learning the stories of different artists and writers, it’s often the case that they spend many years honing their craft before their careers take off. When Monet’s moment arrived, he was prepared—and if his Water Lilies are any evidence, he made the most of it.
Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:
The Impressionist Exhibition, 150 Years Later - Today, the Impressionists are a ubiquitous presence in museums around the world. But the First Impressionist Exhibition, held in Paris in 1874, was met with uproar. Read the full story here.
Art, Commerce, and the Role of the Patron - Nowadays, we take for granted the concept of “art for art’s sake.” But for Renaissance artists, their work was often intimately tied up in the instructions and desires of their powerful patrons. Read the full story here.
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Patron Podcast: The Haunted House in the American Imagination - What makes a house haunted? (Other than the ghosts, of course...) In this episode, we explore spooky Colonials, Victorians, and more. Listen to the latest episode here.
Last week’s Crossroads Roundup: the Las Vegas Desert’s “Mystery Monolith,” a Picasso Archive, and a Real Photo Wins an AI Contest - Our favorite stories on art, archaeology, folklore, and more from this past week. Read the full story here.
“Maison et jardins de Claude Monet,” Fondation Monet, last accessed on June 27, 2024. https://fondation-monet.com/en/
John Rewald, The History of Impressionism: Fourth, Revised Edition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 420.
Rewald, History of Impressionism, 122.
Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874-1904: Sources & Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), 31.
Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (London: Vintage, 2006), 253.
Roe, Private Lives, 256.
Roe, Private Lives, 269.
Loved this, Nicole. You capture the details of Monet's life so wonderfully (both for it's highs and lows)
Hoping you'll continue with more of these articles on other artists.
Nice broad perspective - thanks for that. Finished off my first trip across the pond a couple years ago with a couple sweet days in Giverny at the late-July peak of summer. Crowded but great fun and beautiful. His stuff, chased and nailed so uniquely over decades deserves to be the reigning artist archetype.