none of the mobility and weightiness which are so masterfully brought out in the other paintings. The artist’s attention is concentrated on representing the atmosphere and vibrations in the air which is itself filled with the play of golden-yellow light. The brushwork is matt and pale, with the strokes playing a dematerialising role rather than serving to create form.
Monet made his second trip through the south of France in 1888. He stopped off at Antibes, which welcomed him with a winter rainstorm. When the weather was back to normal and the painter was able to work, the southern light enchanted him all over again. This time his range of colours, based on the most delicately graded nuances of blue and pink, gave his oil painting the look of pastel. “I’m painting the town of Antibes,” he wrote Alice, “a little fortified town, all golden in the sun, standing out against beautiful blue-and-pink mountains and the chain of the Alps forever covered with snow.”
Wherever he worked, Monet did not forget his family. “So know once and for all that you are my whole life, along with my children,” he wrote to Alice from Bordighera, “and while I work I never stop thinking of you. This is so true that, with every motif that I do, that I choose, I say to myself I must render it really well, so you can see where I was and what it’s like.”
However they were not truly a happy family until after the death of Ernest Hoschedé in 1892. The marriage of Alice and Claude Monet took place at Giverny on 16 July 1892.
Ten years earlier, in 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. The house was located on the right bank of the Seine, where its tributary the Epte rushes into the river, right at the border of Normandy and the Île-de-France.
Monet remained fond of the Seine all his life. “I’ve never grown weary of it,” he said later. “It’s always new for me.” It followed naturally that his search for a new home would lead them there. “What enchanted Monet,” recounted Alice’s youngest son, “was the view of the magnificent horizon on which Giverny opens its windows.”
Monet looked at the world with a painter’s eyes, and there were so many motifs for him there. “In between all these bodies of water, great natural grasslands spread out, lushly blooming and ringed with poplar trees,” wrote Jean-Pierre Hoschedé. “Slightly elevated, facing south and running lengthwise over several kilometres, the village stretches out at the foot of the hillside overlooking it.” It was an ordinary village.
The Seine at Giverny, 1897. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 100.5 cm.
Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Haystacks at the End of Summer, Morning Effect, 1891.
Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 100.8 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Stacks of Wheat (Thaw, Sunset), 1890–1891.
Oil on canvas, 64.4 × 92.5 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Monet was lucky and immediately found a large country house where a studio could be set up. Around it stretched a big meadow where it was possible to create a garden. Monet rented this house without hesitation, and bought it soon after.
He lived there until the end of his life. One day he received a letter from Stephane Mallarmé, with the address as follows: “Monsier Monet, que l’hiver ni / L’été sa vision ne leurre / Habite, en peignant, Giverny/Si auprès de Vernon, dans l’Eure” (Mr Monet, whose vision neither winter or summer can deceive, lives and paints in Giverny, located next to Vernon, in the Evre).
The peasants did not accept the painter’s family right away: the city people seemed odd to them. But they were won over by Monet’s passion for work, which they witnessed continually. Every day, no matter what the weather, they saw the painter at his work in the fields. Monet felt at home right from the start. “I’m enraptured,” he wrote to the critic Duret. “Giverny is a splendid place for me.”
Wherever he went he never forgot Giverny. “I get into bed,” he wrote to Alice from Bordighera, “and for a blissful moment, my hands clasped, I think about Giverny and take a peek at my paintings hanging on the wall.”
They moved the floating studio, built in Argenteuil long before, to Giverny. “We used it mostly for diving off the cabin roof,” wrote Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, “and Monet was the leader. He was as good a diver as he was a swimmer, and he supervised our group swims, for the sake of caution.” He delighted in his time with his family.
Sometimes they sailed the boat to Rouen, or went mushroom hunting in the forest. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé remembers a tranquil scene on the riverbank, with Monet painting, Alice sewing, and the children given over to the joys of fishing. The children all loved Monet and were devoted to him.
Alice’s daughter Blanche, who married Claude’s older son Jean, stayed with Monet until the end of his life, taking care of the old painter after her mother’s death. “Monet had a violent, intense temperament, but he was kindness itself,” she recalled. “He loved children. I remember playing prisoners’ base with him on the Vétheuil road, at Roche-Guyon, and also playing hide-and-seek on the Isle de Bennecourt. But when he was working he couldn’t be disturbed for any reason whatever.” In Poppy Field (vol. 1, p. 154), for instance, the line of dark-green trees, interrupted by a building, runs parallel to the bottom edge of the canvas. Now, however, Monet was attracted by the expressiveness of strictly linear rhythms, and his treatment of form became increasingly a matter of planes.
Grainstack (Snow Effect), 1891.
Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 92.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Haystacks: Snow Effect, 1891.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
Monet’s landscapes of the 1880s reflect not only new searchings, but also contradictory stylistic tendencies. Some of these arose from attempt on his part to reach a certain compromise. In March 1880, he wrote to Théodore Duret that he was ‘grooming’ his painting in a desire to exhibit it in the Salon.
He also remarked on his decision to show his works at the international exhibitions of the art dealer Georges Petit. “I am doing this”, Monet explained, “not out of any personal inclination, and I am very sorry that the press and the public would not respond seriously to our small exhibitions, far superior as they were to the official marketplace.
But, well, you have to do what you have to do.” Still, it was less the search for a compromise that pushed Monet towards changes than an inner, as-yet-subconscious sense of the crisis of Impressionism. During the 1880s this feeling was experienced in one way or another by all the creators of the Impressionist method; Pissarro, for example, became closer to Seurat and Signac, and turned sharply towards Divisionism, whilst Renoir felt a new enthusiasm for Ingres and the Renaissance masters.
Unlike them, Monet turned towards no extraneous influence, experienced no impulse from without, but rather followed the logic of his own artistic development, which drove him to a continual intensification of his own experimentation.
This tendency had always been characteristic of Monet, but his perception of nature as a unity had remained constant, always maintaining a harmonious equilibrium as he represented her particular characteristics.
In the 1890s and 1900s,
