Artist Biography: Claude Monet
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This French artist was the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the
Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing
several studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the light or
as his interest shifted. These "series" were generally dated and frequently
exhibited in groups.
In 1890 Monet had bought a strip of marshland across the road from his house and
flower garden, through which flowed a tributary of the Epte. By diverting this
stream, he began to construct a water-lily garden. Soon weeping willows, iris, and
bamboo grew around a free-form pool, clusters of lily pads and blossoms floated on
the quiet water, and a Japanese bridge closed the composition at one end. By 1900 this
unique product of Monet's imagination (for his Impressionism had become more subjective)
was in itself a major work of environmental art – an exotic lotus land
within which he was to meditate and paint for more than 20 years. The first canvases of
lilies, water, and the Japanese bridge were only about one yard square, but their
unprecedented open composition, with the large blossoms and pads suspended as if in
space, and the azure water in which clouds were reflected, implied an encompassing
environment beyond the frame. This concept of embracing spatiality, new to the history
of painting and only implicit in the first water-lily paintings, was expanded by 1925
into a cycle of huge murals to be installed in Paris in two 80-foot oval rooms in the
Orangerie of the Tuileries. These were described in 1952 by the painter André
Masson as the "Sistine Chapel of Impressionism." This crowning achievement
of Monet's long, probing study of nature – his striving to render his
impressions, as he said, "in the face of the most fugitive effects" –
was not dedicated until after his death. The many large studies for the Orangerie
murals, as well as other unprecedented and unique works painted in the water garden
between 1916 and 1925, were almost unknown until the 1950s but are now distributed
throughout the major private collections and museums of the world. Despite failing
eyesight, Monet continued to paint almost until his death in 1926.
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