Chapter Six
CLAUDE MONET &
The Impressionist Landscape
CONTENTS
Introduction
6.1
6.2
6.3
Claude Monet, Eugène Boudin and Normandy
6.4
Argenteuil and the Advent of Impressionism
6.5
Impressionism: A Critical Concept
6.6
Landscape and the Legacy of Romanticism
6.7
6.8
Paint Tubes and Portable Easels: Monet’s Modern Palette
6.9
6.10
6.11
The Garden at Giverny and the Influence of the Orient
6.12
6.13
Water Lilies as Immersive Experience
INTRODUCTION
Impressionism gave artists the liberty to experiment. Freed from narrative content and pictorial restraints, Impressionists such as Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and others established an art movement focused on the spontaneous and objective observation of the immediate world around them.
Their subjects were diverse, ranging from street scenes, café concerts, bourgeois interiors, waterscapes, cityscapes, and portraiture, but the informal group of nineteenth-century radical artists shared a common goal: to break from the strictures of French art academic institutions by adopting innovative approaches to art-making, and new ways by which to bring their work to public attention. They went out of their ateliers to find their subjects, looked to light, atmosphere, and colour to create their canvases, and organized independent exhibitions to show them.
Claude Monet was a central figure in the movement, devoting his life to pursuing the transformative potential of light outdoors. His revolutionary plein air paintings altered how landscape painting was approached, conveyed, and perceived. His technique of building images through colour patches dabbed side by side, or passages of sheer, light-filled washes, produced sensory optical compositions that radically departed from the established norm. Monet aimed to depict the seen world as experienced on the retina’s surface rather than to describe an illusion of the known world of space, mass, and contextual detail.
This chapter will consider the evolutionary course of Monet’s naturalistic approach and his unique contribution to the Impressionist movement. In the early stages of his career, Monet was influenced by Romanticist painters like Eugène Delacroix and Camille Corot. Delacroix’s expressive use of color and Corot’s sensitivity to nature left a lasting impression on Monet’s artistic sensibilities. Additionally, Monet’s association with the older artist Eugène Boudin, who was known for his seascapes and beach scenes, played a crucial role in shaping his early interest in capturing the effects of light on water. The influence of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints is also noteworthy, as Monet incorporated elements of their composition and use of colour into his own work. We will trace the development of his luminous, open-air paintings in works produced along the Channel coast in Normandy, at Argenteuil and on the banks of the Seine River, and his interest in recording perceptual processes in the serial works of Rouen and Giverny, cu