Claude Monet. Volume 2. Nina Kalitina

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      Each fragment of such a landscape, taken separately, amounts to a complete colour composition in itself. Claude Monet was the first of the 19^th-century painters to understand the abstract beauty of the canvas’ painted surface.

      Whenever he left Giverny, Monet would most often hurry to the sea. Arriving in Brittany in September 1886, he went to the island of Belle-Île. “I’ve set up residence in the little hamlet of Belle-Île,” he wrote to his dealer.

      “I’m working a lot, the location is very lovely but very wild, but the sea is incomparably beautiful, and has amazing rocks. The place is even called ‘the wild sea’.”

      The Breton landscape resembled no other. “I’m excited by this dark country exactly because it takes me away from what I’m used to doing.” The autumn weather was not favourable for his work: “For three days there’s been a terrible storm, and I’ve never seen such a sight.”

      He worked whether it was raining or there was a raging storm, and at times he was forced to cling to the rocks.

      This extraordinarily hard work brought its rewards: the seascapes painted in Brittany are remarkably expressive. The brushstrokes of white lead, blue, and green create the impression of perpetually agitated water, and of the incessant noise of the Atlantic Ocean, which gives eerie shapes to the shingles tossed up by its tides.

      The young critic Geffroy, an acquaintance who would later become a friend, witnessed Monet’s heroic open-air work.

      But Monet painted most often in Normandy. It had an inexhaustible diversity, and his fondness for it had begun long before. “The area is very lovely and I truly regret that I didn’t come to it earlier,” he wrote to Alice in 1882. “One couldn’t be closer to the sea than I am, right on the shingle, in fact, and the waves are beating against the base of the house.”

      He dreamt of showing Alice and the children the cliffs in the region of Caux, the flowering fields overlooking the sea, and the little fishing hamlets tucked into the recesses of the coast.

      Earlier, in his youth, Boudin had brought him onto the cliffs near Dieppe, where he experienced the revelation of the Normandy landscape’s diversity. From the end of the 1860s onward, Monet explored the beauty of Étretat. Courbet had previously painted the arch the waters had sculpted into the coastal cliffs.

      Waterloo Bridge in London, 1902. Oil on canvas,

      65.7 × 100.5 cm. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

      Charing Cross Bridge in London, c. 1902. Oil on canvas,

      65.3 × 100. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

      It seemed gigantic when used as a backdrop for the little boats gliding along the shore. But Monet found his own motifs there.

      What most interested him were the atmospheric phenomena that alter nature’s colour. The reflections of the water shifted constantly, and alighted in coloured patches on the cliffs. The cliffs themselves seemed to go into motion, together with the sea and the clouds.

      In Normandy, Blanche Hoschedé, Alice’s daughter, made her first attempts at painting. Monet’s example inspired his children. One day the writer Guy de Maupassant happened to see Claude Monet at work. This is how, in an unfinished tale, he described the painter on the cliffs of Étretat:

      Last year, […] I often followed Claude Monet searching for impressions. He was no longer a painter, actually, he was a hunter. He would go along, followed by children who carried his canvasses – five or six canvasses representing the same subject at various times and with different effects.

      He would take them up and put them aside one by one, according to the changes in the sky. The painter waited in front of his subject, keeping an eye on the sun and the shadows, then snatching, in a few brushstrokes, a descending ray of sunlight or a passing cloud and, disdainful of the false and the conventional, placing them rapidly on the canvas.

      A few paintings of haystacks at Giverny suggested to Monet the idea of creating a whole series on this theme. He began in 1890 and by 1891 he was already able to show his Haystacks at Durand-Ruel’s – fifteen variations with a glowing or darkening sky, bright green or ashen-grey meadow, haystacks shot with red, yellow, or lilac, and the multi-coloured shadows they produced.

      In critical works on Monet it is frequently suggested that in all his series the artist strove only for objective recording of optical impressions.

      Monet did indeed set himself this task, but that did not prevent him from remaining an involved, creative artist, conveying his own emotional state to the viewer. Moreover, in his first series the lyrical impulse was still strongly in evidence. The politician and art critic Anatoly Lunacharsky remarked:

      Claude Monet made countless pictures of a single object, for example, a haystack, painting it in the morning, at noon, in the evening, in the moonlight, in the rain, and so on.

      One might expect these exercises – which link Monet with the Japanese – to produce something like a set of scientific colouristic statements about the celebrated haystack, but instead they prove to be miniature poems. The haystack is at times majestically proud, at times sentimentally pensive, or mournful…

      Rouen Cathedral, 1892. Oil on canvas,

      100 × 65 cm. Private collection, France.

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