of the attacks of tormenting dissatisfaction and nagging doubt to which he was prone.
His gradually mounting annoyance and discontent with himself would frequently find an outlet in acts of unbridled and elemental fury, when Monet would destroy dozens of canvasses, scraping off the paint, cutting them up into pieces, and sometimes even burning them.
The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, to whom Monet was bound by contract, received a whole host of letters from him requesting that the date for a showing of paintings be deferred. Monet would write that he had “not only scraped off, but simply torn up” the studies he had begun, that for his own satisfaction it was essential to make alterations, that the results he had achieved were “incommensurate with the amount of effort expended”, that he was in “a bad mood” and “no good for anything”.
Monet was capable of showing considerable civic courage, but was occasionally guilty of faint-heartedness and inconsistency. Thus in 1872 Monet, together with the painter Eugène Boudin, visited the idol of his youth, Gustave Courbet, in prison – an event perhaps not greatly significant in itself, but given the general hounding to which the Communard Courbet was subject at that time, an act both brave and noble.
With regard to the memory of Édouard Manet, Monet was the only member of the circle around the former leader of the Batignolles group to take action upon hearing, in 1889, from the American artist John Singer Sargent, that Manet’s masterpiece Olympia might be sold to the USA.
It was Monet who called upon the French public to collect the money to buy the painting for the Louvre. Again, at the time of the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s Monet sided with Dreyfus’ supporters and expressed his admiration for the courage of Emile Zola.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Claude Monet, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide, 1865.
Oil on canvas, 90.2 × 150.5 cm.
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (Texas).
Impressionism
The Impressionists and Academic Painting
A more domestic episode testifies to the warmth of Monet’s nature: after becoming a widower, he remarried in the 1880s. Alice Hoschedé has five children from her first marriage. Monet received them all with open arms and invariably referred to them as “my children”. There was, however, another side to Monet. In the late 1860s, suffering acutely from poverty and lack of recognition, Monet on several occasions left his first wife Camille and their young son Jean, virtually abandoning them.
Giving in to fits of despair, he would rush off somewhere, anywhere, just to change his surroundings and escape from an environment in which he had suffered personal and professional failure. On one occasion he even resolved to take his own life.
Similarly hard to justify is Monet’s behaviour towards the other Impressionists when, following Renoir’s example, he broke their ‘sacred union’ and refused to take part in the group’s fifth, sixth, and eighth exhibitions. Degas was not unjustified in accusing him of thoughtless self-advertising when he learned of Monet’s refusal to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1880.
Finally, Monet’s hostile attitude to Paul Gauguin was quite indefensible. These examples make the contradictions of Monet’s character quite clear. The reader might justifiably ask: why write about personal features in an essay on an artist, particularly when some of these show Monet in a not-especially-attractive light?
It is, however, always dangerous to divide a single, integral personality into two halves – on the one hand, the ordinary man with all the complexities and upheavals of his individual lot; on the other, the brilliant painter who wrote his name in the history of world art.
Great works of art are not created by ideal people, and if knowledge of their personality does not actually assist us in understanding their masterpieces, then at least it can explain a great deal about the circumstances in which the masterpieces were created.
Monet’s abrupt changes of mood, his constant dissatisfaction with himself, his spontaneous decisions, stormy emotion and cold methodicalness, his consciousness of himself as a personality moulded by the preoccupations of his age, set against his extreme individualism – taken together these features elucidate much in Monet’s creative processes and attitudes towards his own work. The young men who would become the Impressionists formed a group in the early 1860s. Claude Monet, son of a Le Havre shopkeeper, Frédéric Bazille, son of a wealthy Montpellier family, Alfred Sisley, son of an English family living in France, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, son of a Parisian tailor, had all come to study painting in the independent studio of Charles Gleyre, whom in their view was the only teacher who truly personified Neo-classical painting.
The Lighthouse at the Hospice, 1864.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 81 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
Alfred Sisley, The Barges, c. 1870.
Oil on canvas, 69 × 100 cm, Musée de Dieppe, Dieppe.
Gleyre had just turned sixty when he met the future Impressionists. Born in Switzerland on the banks of Lake Léman, he had lived in France since childhood. After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts, Gleyre spent six years in Italy.
Success in the Paris Salon made him famous and he taught in the studio established by the celebrated Salon painter, Hippolyte Delaroche. Taking themes from the Bible and antique mythology, Gleyre painted large-scale canvasses composed with classical clarity. The formal qualities of his female nudes can only be compared to the work of the great Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
In Gleyre’s independent studio, pupils received traditional training in Neo-classical painting, but were free from the official requirements of the École des Beaux-Arts.
Our best source of information regarding the future Impressionists’ studies with Gleyre is none other than Renoir himself, in conversation with his son, the renowned filmmaker Jean Renoir. The elder Renoir described his teacher as a “powerful Swiss, bearded and near-sighted” and remembered Gleyre’s Latin Quarter studio, on the left bank of the Seine, as “a big empty room packed with young men bent over their easels. Grey light spilled onto the model from a picture window facing north, according to the rules”.
Gleyre’s students could hardly be less alike. Young men from wealthy families who were playing at being artists came to the studio wearing jackets and black velvet berets.
Monet derisively called these students ‘the grocers’ on account of their narrow minds. The white house-painter’s coat that Renoir worked in was the butt of their jokes. But Renoir and his new friends paid them no heed. “He was there to learn how to draw figures,” his son recalls. “As he covered his paper with strokes of charcoal, he was soon completely engrossed in the shape of a calf or the curve of a hand.”
Renoir and his friends took art school seriously, to such an extent that Gleyre was disconcerted by the extraordinary facility with which Renoir worked. Renoir mimicked his teacher’s criticisms in a funny Swiss accent that the students used to make fun of him: “Cheune homme, fous êdes drès atroit, drès toué, mais on tirait que fous beignez bour fous amuser.” (Young man, you are very talented and very gifted,
