Impressionist Works by Claude Monet

Famous Artist: Claude Monet

The famous French Impressionist painter Monet was born in 1840. His full name was Oscar-Claude Monet, and he was baptized a Catholic in Paris. When he was 16, his mother died. His father wanted him to go into the family business, but Monet had received encouragement from his mother, who had been a singer, to pursue art. Monet moved around a great deal in his youth, spent some time in Africa with the French Cavalry, and eventually returned to Paris and made friends with other artists who, like him, wanted to embark on a new artistic method that would focus on color and light, and paintings that reflected the wonderful nature of the world as experienced by the painter. Monet liked to paint in the open air, and the style of Impressionism was born as a movement with his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise.

Monet married twice: his first wife died in her 30s, and the wife of a friend looked after his children. Later on, Monet would marry that woman too, once her husband died. For the first few decades of his life as a painter, Monet and his family were poor—but by the 1890s, the appeal of Impressionism had taken off, and Monet became wealthy enough to be able to buy home, land, develop an extensive garden and have an art studio all his own.

Monet suffered from cataracts in his later life, and his paintings in the 20th century reflect the change in his vision: they are less crisp, blurrier, and lack the snap and vitality of his most famous works. He died in 1926, and he was buried in Giverny. Today, he is remembered as the father of Impressionism, and his paintings sell for many millions of dollars to collectors around the world.

Monet lived through the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, but he did so by first moving to England with his family and then to the Netherlands. During that time he painted dozens of paintings, but his style was still considered revolutionary (at the time) by the art establishment. The Royal Academy rejected his paintings for exhibition, and the police in the Netherlands suspected him of revolutionary activities. Yet Monet mainly wanted to paint nature and avoid all the tension and conflict in the world. One would never know that the Franco-Prussian War, which would set the stage for the bitter hostilities between France and Germany that would later lead to World War 1, went on during Monet’s most productive period. War does not even seem possible in a world reflected by Monet’s art. That is because Monet loved to paint water lilies, and scenes of women dressed in the Victorian dress sitting or standing in a garden. He painted ships at sea, the locomotive at the train station, whatever he saw that enchanted him. He was in love with the enchanting world around him, and that is what is reflected in his paintings, without a doubt. Yet there is one painting, of his first wife on her death bed, that is sadly without this same happy enchantment: she had been a model in so many of his earlier works—but in this one she is nearly invisible in a sea of purples and grays, streaked across the canvas as though burying her alive beneath their oppressive weight. Yet Monet never stopped painting; poverty, war, death, constant movement—none of it stopped him. He was a man determined to paint and to capture the world as an Impressionist.

One of my favorite Monet paintings is The Magpie (1869), which hangs in the Musee d’Orsay. It reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting with its simple elegance yet realistic charm. It is a winter setting: a snow-covered yard, rock wall, trees, and a magpie sitting on a wooden gate make up its subject. But the way Monet captures the light of the day on the snow and balances that effect with the light shade of the surroundings makes the painting pop with life. Another one I like is Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son (1875). Here Monet is perched below a woman, who stands atop a crest in the field, with her small parasol umbrella held over her head for shade, while her small son stands just over the crest looking on at his father, who is not captured in the scene but who is doing the painting. The colors of the field, the dress, the sky—it is all so brilliant and breath-taking that one feels a deep melancholy simply by looking at it—as though here were time itself captured in oil painting on a canvas. It makes one ache—the way the woman’s features are hidden by the shade of the umbrella, giving it such mystery.

Then there is Water Lilies (1906), which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. This painting is beautiful just for the way it captures the serenity of the pond, and the light of the sky reflecting on the surface of the water between two “islands” of lily pads that float on the pond. It is like looking through a window of art onto nature itself; like stepping through a magical portal into the world that Monet inhabited. It is magic, and so few paintings have such effect. No matter how realistic a painting may be, the Impressionist works of Monet are more realistic in a way because they capture that ineffable brilliance found in nature that can only be captured through the kind of brightness of soul that Monet—and perhaps Van Gogh and a few others—possessed. Monet’s focus on color is really what gave him his power and art. I would rank him with Vermeer, the Dutch painter (who also resembles Rockwell), in terms of painters who used color to the best and most brilliant effect. And of course Van Gogh must also be in that group. But it is Monet’s garden scenes and water lilies that give one a sense of eternity.