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0:21
Claude Monet was the leader of the French Impressionist movement, literally giving the movement its name. As an inspirational talent and personality, he was crucial in bringing its adherents together. Interested in painting in the open air and capturing natural light, Monet would later bring the technique to one of its most famous pinnacles with his series paintings, in which his observations of the same subject,
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viewed at various times of the day, were captured in numerous sequences. Masterful as a colorist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.
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Born in Paris, Oscar Claude Monet moved at the age of five to Le Havre, a seaside town in northern France. His father was a successful grocer that later turned to shipping. His mother died when he was 15. The ocean and rugged coastline of Northern France had a profound effect on him at an early age, and he would often run away from school to go for walks along the cliffs and beaches. As a youth, he received instruction at the College du Havre from a former pupil of the
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famous Neo-Classical artist Jacques-Louis David. Creative and enterprising from an early age, he drew caricatures in his spare time and sold them for 20 francs apiece. Capitalizing on his early aptitude for art, he managed to save a good bit of money from his art sales.
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A pivotal experience occurred in 1856 when Monet became friends with Eugéne Boudin, a landscape painter famous for his scenes of northern French coastal towns. Boudin encouraged him to paint outdoors, and this en plein air technique changed Monet's concept of how art could be created: "It was as if a veil was torn from my eyes; I had understood. I grasped what painting could be." View from Rouelles is a 1858 painting by Claude Monet. The painting depicts the
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landscape surrounding a small stream, either the Rouelles or the Lézarde, in the Rouelles district of Le Havre in Normandy, France. Painted when Monet was seventeen, it is the earliest known painting by the artist. The painting is signed "O. Monet", as it was painted before Oscar-Claude Monet dropped the 'Oscar' from his name in his early twenties.
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Boudin, who was fifteen years Monet's senior, became the seventeen-and-a-half years old Monet's first painting instructor. In the early summer of 1858, probably just a few months after Monet's first meeting Boudin, the two went on a painting expedition into Montgeon forest in Rouelles, on the north-east side of Le Havre. It was on this expedition that Monet first gained an appreciation for nature. The young Monet watched as Boudin painted, and painted View from Rouelles following
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Boudin's instructions. View from Rouelles was likely not Monet's first attempt at painting, however, as the painting is far too sophisticated and refined to have been his first attempt.
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outlook. Coming home to Le Havre after his service, his "final education of the eye" was
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l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), which Monet completed in 1865 at the age of 25, is now considered by many to be his first youthful masterpiece.
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Heavily inspired by Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which caused great scandal in the Parisian art world, Monet’s painting portrays a similar scene. Five well-to-do Parisians are enjoying the summer weather in the shade of a light-hearted picnic, located in the Fontainebleau Forest, just outside of Paris. The experimental use of light, shadows and the blurring of natural shapes, such as the leaves, have been
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identified as precursors to Impressionism, which would later infuse the artist’s work.
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It remains unfinished, but two large fragments (central and left panels) are now in the Musée d'Orsayin Paris, whilst a smaller 1866 version is now in the Pushkin Museumin Moscow.
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Monet also included the artist Gustave Courbet in the painting. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in its whole depicts twelve people. They are dressed in Parisian fashion of the time. They are having a picnic near a forest glade. The people are gathered around a white picnic blanket, where food as fruits, cake or wine is located. The mood in this natural space is primarily created by the play of light and shadow, which originates by deciduous trees above them.
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Monet had hoped the painting would achieve recognition at the Paris Salon, as Manet had done in his previous work. However, due to financial difficulties, which would go on to plague him throughout his younger years as an artist, Monet had to sell the painting to a creditor, who kept it locked up and unseen in a cellar for many years.
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In 1865, the Paris Salon accepted two of Monet's seascapes for exhibition with La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide and Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur. Monet then hoped Le déjeuner sur l'herbe would help him break through into the Salon of 1866. He could not finish it in a timely manner and instead submitted The Woman in the Green Dress and Pavé de Chailly to acceptance.
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Claude Monet was feeling confined by working in a studio, preferring his earlier experience of painting in nature, so he moved just outside Paris to the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. Using his future wife, Camille Doncieux, as his sole model, his ambitiously large Women in the Garden (1866-67) was a culmination of the ideas and themes in his earlier work. Monet was hopeful that the work would be included in the Paris Salon, but his style kept him at odds
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with the jurors and the picture was refused, leaving the artist devastated. The official salon at this time still valued Romanticism. (In 1921, to assuage the 50-year-old insult, Monet made the French government purchase the painting for the enormous sum of 200,000 francs.) Thereafter, he submitted works to the Salon annually until 1870, but they were accepted by the juries only twice, in 1866 and 1868. He sent no more works to the Salon until his single,
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final attempt in 1880. His work was considered radical, "discouraged at all official levels".
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A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur (La Charrette, route sous la neige à Honfleur) is an oil-on-canvas snowscape painting by Monet. The painting depicts a man on a wooden cart travelling along a snow-laden road in Honfleur. Although dated as 1867, this work was given a date of 1865 when it became housed in the Louvre in 1911. It is likely that the later date is, in fact, the correct one,
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or certainly more likely according to the local painter, Alexandre Dubourg. At the time, Monet, along with fellow artists, Courbet, Bazille, Boudin, and Jongkind, spent time at the Saint-Simeon farm where he worked on a number of snow-themed works. It was a quiet spot in Normandy frequented by all these artists in order to further their respective paintings. This particular work, of Honfleur, followed Courbet's snowscapes - where his typical
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motif was the stag and the hunter, Monet opted for a more deserted landscape. Here the cart, its driver, and the horseplay a minor role. It is the snow and the landscape that it envelops which is the dominant feature. Painting themes covered in the snow gave Monet another perspective with regard to light. The changes in color here are extremely subtle, yet they are vivid in their portrayal of the overall scene. It is a tranquil, everyday setting under a winter sky,
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while the ground, rooftops, and trees are covered in a picturesque and heavy covering of snow.
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Monet used a limited number of shades but has still captured the reflections, shadows, and light on his landscape. Monet was taken with the Normandy winter countryside and his snow pieces in the second half of the 1860s pay homage to this. This is an exquisite composition, carefully crafted with colors that "bleed" into one another while creating a beautiful work of Impressionism.
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Commentators cite that this particular work was greatly influenced by Japanese prints - they gave the effect of bright light reflecting off the snow as they were printed with translucent colored inks on light paper. The painting is thought to be heavily influenced by the snowscapes of Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858),
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such as Ochanomizu and Clear weather after snow at Kaneyama (1797–1858). Aspects such as the single vanishing point and varied colors of snow can also trace their influences back to Japan. A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur is one of nearly 140 snowscapes painted by Monet. It is believed to be his first completed snowscape, and is similar to other snowscapes by him such as The Road in Front of Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter, The Magpie, Snow at Argenteuil, and The Red Cape.
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Camille, also known as The Woman in the Green Dress, is an 1866 oil-on-canvas painting. The portrait shows Monet's future wife, Camille Doncieux, wearing a green dress and jacket. Monet submitted the work to the Paris Salon of 1866, where it was well received by critics. The painting is held in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen.
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Camille in the Green Dress is a life size portrait. Camille wears a green and black striped silk dress over a black jacket trimmed with fur. The dress in emerald green corresponds to the fashion of the time with the contrasting vertical stripes. Yellow leather gloves and a dark capote decorated with feathers serve as accessories. Camille wears her hair in a bun tied with black ribbons at the nape of her neck. The background has a dark red, almost black curtain.
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In the composition of the image, Monet succeeded in conveying movement. The train of the dress has been cut off at its left edge, causing a movement in that direction that goes beyond the edge of the picture. Liveliness is also created by the play of the folds in the skirt. The slightly backward-turned position of the head represents a moment of pause. The figure seems to be listening to herself rather than reacting
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to someone speaking to her. This is achieved through downcast eyes, thereby avoiding eye contact with the viewer. The painting is signed at lower right: Claude Monet 1866. The lighting is uniquely diffused and its origin is obscure. We see a kind of a semi circle of light surrounding Camille on the floor with the source highlighting her face, hand and skirt. Light is probably coming from a window since it looks too natural to be produced by
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candles or gas lamps. The place of the window is hard to tell but it’s probably to the left and in front of her as her shadow is cast to the right, but her face and skirt are still highlighted.
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Woman in the Garden (Femme au jardin) (or Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden) is a painting begun in 1866 by Claude Monet when he was a young man of 26. The work was executed en plein air in oil on canvas with a relatively large size of 82 by 101 cm. and currently belongs in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia.
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The woman in the painting is Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre, the young wife of his well-to-do cousin Paul-Eugene Lecadre. The Lecadres lived at Le Havre and had a country house, Le Coteau, in nearby Sainte-Adresse, in the garden of which the painting was made during a short visit. X-ray analysis has revealed that it was actually painted over a previous picture. The style of the painting is quite composed and detailed, unlike the typically impressionist
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works for which Monet was later acclaimed. Three principal objects, Jeanne-Marguerite, the central flowering rose bush in the bed of bright red flowers and the flowering bush on the right provide an ordered structure and Jeanne-Marguerite's bright white dress contrasts vividly with the reds, pinks and greens of the garden plants and trees. The subject matter foreshadowed Monet's lifelong passion for painting flowers and gardens in a natural setting.
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The Regatta at Sainte-Adresse was painted in 1867 and is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This painting and The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (Art Institute of Chicago) were probably conceived as a pair. They are identical in size, and their viewing point differs by only a few yards. Sainte-Adresse, the well-to-do suburb of Le Havre, was the home of Monet's father. Destitute, Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his father and aunt Sophie Lecadre
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at the cost of abandoning his companion, Camille Doncieux, and their newborn son, Jean. Monet attended the birth in Paris and returned to the coast a few days later.
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The pair of paintings juxtaposes this sunny regatta watched at high tide by well dressed bourgeois, with an overcast scene at low tide, fishing boats hauled onto the beach peopled with sailors and workers. Since Monet never exhibited the paintings side by side, the contrast between them was probably not intended as a social manifesto but instead reflected differing conditions under which the same place could be painted.
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On 25 June 1867, Monet reported that he was working on about twenty pictures: "Among the seascapes, I am doing the regattas of Le Havre with many figures on the beach and the outer harbor covered with small sails."
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The Garden at Sainte-Adresse was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art after an auction sale at Christie's in December 1967, under the French title La terrasse à Sainte-Adresse. Monet spent the summer of 1867 at the resort town of Sainte-Adresse on the English Channel, near Le Havre (France). It was there, in a garden with a view of Honfleur on the horizon, that he painted this picture, which combines smooth, traditionally rendered areas with
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sparkling passages of rapid, separate brushwork, and spots of pure colour. The models were probably Monet's father, Adolphe, in the foreground, Monet's cousin's wife Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre at the fence; Adolphe, her father; and perhaps, Sophie, her sister, the woman seated with her back to the viewer. Although the scene projects affluent domesticity, it is by no means a family portrait. Monet's relations with his father were tense that summer, owing to family
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disapproval of the young artist's liaison with his companion, Camille Doncieux, his wife-to-be. Monet called this work in his correspondence "the Chinese painting in which there are flags". His friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir referred to it as "the Japanese painting". In the 1860s, the composition's flat horizontal bands of colour would have reminded the sophisticated of Japanese colour wood-block prints, which were avidly collected by Monet,
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Manet, Renoir, Whistler, and others in their circle. The print by the Japanese artist Hokusai that may have inspired this picture, Turban-shell Hall of the Five-Hundred-Rakan Temple (1830), remains today at Monet's house-museum at Giverny. The elevated vantage point and relatively even sizes of the horizontal areas emphasize the two-dimensionality of the painting. The three horizontal zones of the composition seem to rise parallel to the picture plane
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instead of receding into space. The subtle tension resulting from the combination of illusionism and the two-dimensionality of the surface remained an important characteristic of Monet's style. The painting is now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was bought in 1967, with special contributions given or bequeathed by friends of the Museum.
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On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (Au bord de l’eau; Bennecourt) or River Scene at Bennecourt is an 1868 oil on canvas painting, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, to which it was given by the Palmer family in 1922.
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The picture portrays Monet's model, partner and future wife Camille Doncieux looking back from an island in the Seine towards the village of Gloton on the outskirts of Bennecourt, where they were temporarily staying with their young son, Jean. It was painted at a low point in Monet's life: after being thrown out of their Gloton rooms he threw himself in the river the following night (with no serious aftereffects) before returning home to Paris alone.
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It had been bought by Louis Aimé Léon Clapisson of Neuilly-sur-Seine for 500 francs. He lent it to the Galerie Georges Petit for its exhibition Claude Monet; A. Rodin in 1889. Clapisson sold it for 1,500 francs on 21 April 1892 to Durand-Ruel, who on 18 May the same year sold it on to Potter Palmer of Chicago for 7,500 francs. It descended through the Palmer family, who loaned it for a time before donating it to its present owner.
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L'Enfant a la tasse, portrait de Jean Monet is an oil painting by Impressionist Claude Monet created in 1868. The painting – which features Monet's son Jean sitting next to a white and blue striped cup – is Monet's third painting to feature his son. The painting was first owned by a friend of Monet in Le Havre, who returned it to Monet in 1883. It has been exhibited at the Albertina in Vienna in 2018, as part of a major exhibition
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of Monet’s body of work. The retrospective was titled “Claude Monet - A Floating World”. The painting was listed for sale at USD $1.45 million as part of its "fine art" initiative in August 2013. Economist Tyler Cowen criticized the Amazon for its initiative saying it "looks like dealers trying to unload unwanted, hard to sell inventory" referring to the many cheap lithographs (a kind of copies) offered
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at the platform at that time, in stark contrast to this Monet, which is an important original. The Magpie created during the winter of 1868–1869 near the commune of Étretat in Normandy. Monet's patron, Louis Joachim Gaudibert, helped arrange a house in Étretat for Monet's girlfriend Camille Doncieux and their newborn son, allowing Monet to paint in relative comfort, surrounded by his family.
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The Magpie is one of approximately 140 snowscapes produced by Monet. His first snowscape, A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur, was painted sometime in either 1865 or 1867, followed by a notable series of snowscapes in the same year, beginning with The Road in Front of Saint-Simeon Farm in Winter. The Magpie was completed in 1869 and is Monet's largest winter painting. It was followed by The Red Cape (1869–1871), the only known winter painting featuring Camille Doncieux.
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The canvas of The Magpie depicts a solitary black magpie perched on a gate formed in a wattle fence, as the light of the sun shines upon freshly fallen snow creating blue shadows. The painting features one of the first examples of Monet's use of colored shadows, which would later become associated with the Impressionist movement. Monet and the Impressionists used colored shadows to represent the actual, changing conditions
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of light and shadow as seen in nature, challenging the academic convention of painting shadows black. This subjective theory of color perception was introduced to the art world through the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Michel Eugène Chevreul earlier in the century. In the painting, a black magpie is perched on a gate in a wattle fence as sunlight falls on fresh white snow, creating shadows. With no human figures present,
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the bird on the gate becomes the focus. An extraordinary evocation of the snow-bound chill of a late winter's afternoon. The blueness of the long shadows creates a delicate contrast with the creamy whites of the sky and landscape". The Magpie is an early example of Monet's investigation of colored shadows. In this piece, Monet makes use of the complementary colors of blue and yellow. The shadow produced by yellow sunlight shining on the snow gives the impression of a blue-violet
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color, the effect of simultaneous contrast. French Impressionists popularized the use of colored shadows, which went against the artistic convention of portraying shadows by darkening and desaturating the color. Colored shadows can be directly observed in nature, particularly in the type of snow scene presented by Monet. Monet submitted The Magpie and Fishing Boats at Sea to the Salon of 1869. Both paintings were
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rejected in April. Critic Paul Richard said that the jurors rejected the painting as "too common and too coarse". Monet's experimental use of color and radical departure from the descriptive, academic style surprised the public and probably contributed to its dismissal by the jury. Monet told French novelist Arsène Houssaye (1815–1896), "This rejection has taken the bread from my mouth, and in spite of my low prices, collectors and dealers turn their backs on me."
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A century later, The Magpie was acquired by the Musée d'Orsay in 1984. It became one of the most popular paintings in their permanent collection.
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Intérieur, Après dîner (Interior, after Dinner) is an oil-on-canvas painting created during the winter of 1868–1869, a productive time for the painter. He spent the winter in Étretat with his girlfriend Camille Doncieux and their newborn son. Interior, after Dinner, which takes place later in the night, is a companion piece to The Dinner (Le Dîner) which shows the same event earlier in the evening. These are the only two interior
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night paintings in Monet's entire work and may have served as a study for The Luncheon (1868). The painting shows two women seated at a table and a man standing. Camille Doncieux has been positively identified in the gray gown, appearing a year before she and Monet were to be married. It is unclear who the other two people might be. Marie-Louise Adelaide-Eugenie Sisley, the future wife of Alfred Sisley, and Sisley himself are said to possibly appear seated in
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The Dinner. However, this becomes less clear in the companion piece of Interior after Dinner. The man standing near the fireplace mantle could be Monet's friend Frédéric Bazille. Art historian Hollis Clayson writes that the painting is "an exemplary naturalist nighttime interior in its quiet assessment of the subtleties of diffuse lamplight (from a ceiling oil lamp) plus firelight in the context of a quiet social gathering."
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The Red Cape, also sometimes known as Madame Monet or The Red Kerchief, is an oil-on-canvas snowscape by Monet from circa 1868-1873. The painting depicts Claude Monet's first wife, Camille, dressed in a red cape, passing outside of a window. Monet painted the painting while living in Argenteuil. The solitary setting at his home there allowed him to paint in relative peace, as well as spend time with his family.
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Camille’s red cape is the first thing that catches our eye. The intense red colour breaks the monotony of whites and greys. In a winter fairytale a ripe, blooming carnation. The trees and the snow outside are captured in patches of colour, in a typical Impressionist manner. Everything is very soft and vague. Camille must have been walking around in the garden while Monet was sitting inside, and she must have glanced for a mere moment towards the house and yet,
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in this painting, she seems almost frozen in time. Almost ghost-like is her pale face, here for a moment and disappearing quickly, like a vision from a dream. Camille was originally Monet’s model at first, and she wasn’t his wife at the time the painting was painted, namely, they were married two years later, in June 1870. It seems also that this painting held a special place in Monet’s heart because he kept it with him until his death, adament not to be parted with it.
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Camille was only twenty-one years old when this was painted, but a decade later she would be dead. It is Monet's only known snowscape painting that features Camille Monet. Since 1958, it has been in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.
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La Grenouillère is an 1869 painting depicts "Flowerpot Island", also known as the Camembert, and the gangplank to La Grenouillère, a floating restaurant and boat-hire on the Seine at Croissy-sur-Seine. Monet wrote on September 25, 1869 in a letter to fellow artist Frédéric Bazille, "I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches, but it is only a dream. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also
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wants to do this painting." Monet and Renoir, both desperately poor, were quite close at the time. As in his earlier picture of the Garden at Sainte-Adresse, Monet concentrated on repetitive elements – the ripples on the water, the foliage, the boats, the human figures – to weave a fabric of brushstrokes which, although emphatically brushstrokes, retain a strong descriptive quality. This painting and one in the London National Gallery (Bathers at La Grenouillere) are
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probably the sketches mentioned by Monet in his letter. A bigger size painting, now lost but formerly in the Arnhold collection in Berlin, may well have been the "tableau" that he dreamed of. The broad, constructive brushstrokes here are clearly those of a sketch. For his exhibition pictures Monet usually sought a more delicate and carefully calibrated surface at this time. An almost identical composition of the same
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subject by Renoir, La Grenouillère, is in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. La Grenouillère was a popular middle-class resort consisting of a spa, a boating establishment and a floating café. Optimistically promoted as "Trouville-sur-Seine", it was located on the Seine near Bougival, easily accessible by train from Paris and had just been favoured with a visit by Emperor Napoleon III with his wife and son. Monet and Renoir both
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recognized in La Grenouillère an ideal subject for the images of leisure they hoped to sell.
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The painting is now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was bequeathed by Mrs. Havemeyer in 1929.
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In the fall of 1870, Monet traveled to London and this painting is one of a series of works he created while based in the British capital. This view is of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament - covered in other pieces - as seen from Victoria Quay. Like many of Monet's other works, it has a photographic quality to it despite its Impressionist style. Again, Monet uses a fragmented brushstroke to create his magical movement in the river. He also, once
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again, alludes to the fog and smog that gripped London in the later part of the 19th century. The composition is made up of gray tones, with a pink hue that appears on the horizon. It was while in London that Monet met Paul Durand-Ruel who was to become his most supportive patron.
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Both Monet and Camille Pissarro - in London to escape the Franco-Prussian War - were intrigued and interested in the city, although the works would prove extremely different in terms of subjects. Pissarro chose the suburbs, while Monet chose the more conventional themes of the Houses of Parliament and Hyde Park.
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Windmill at Zaandam is an 1871 oil painting by Claude Monet. Monet and his family fled to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War. At its end, he returned to France, but took a detour via Zaandam in the Netherlands on the recommendation of Charles-François Daubigny, spending five months there and producing about 20 paintings of the flat landscape thereabouts.
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In a continued effort to protest the salon system, Monet and his friends organized their own exhibition in 1874, held in the vacated studio of photographer and
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Intuitive feeling and the essence of spontaneity, of the moment, were impressed upon the canvas.
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It was through the 1873 work Impression, Sunrise that Monet inadvertently gave the movement its name, although that name was actually initially used by writers to criticize these types of works.
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Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of Le Havre, Monet's hometown. It is usually displayed at the Musée Marmottan Monet but was on loan at the Musée d'Orsay from 26 March until 14 July 2024, and is currently at the National Gallery of Art from 8 September 2024 until 19 January 2025. Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of Le Havre at sunrise, the two small rowboats in the foreground and the red Sun being the focal elements. In the middle ground,
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more fishing boats are included, while in the background on the left side of the painting are clipper ships with tall masts. Behind them are other misty shapes that "are not trees but smokestacks of pack boats and steamships, while on the right in the distance are other masts and chimneys silhouetted against the sky." In order to show these features of industry, Monet eliminated existing houses on the left side of the jetty, leaving the background unobscured.
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Following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71,
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the regeneration of France was exemplified in the thriving port of Le Havre. Art historian Paul Tucker suggests that the contrast of elements like the steamboats and cranes in the background to the fishermen in the foreground represent these political implications:
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"Monet may have seen this painting of a highly commercial site as an answer to the postwar calls for patriotic action and an art that could lead. For while it is a poem of light and atmosphere, the painting can also be seen as an ode to the power and beauty of a revitalized France."
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The hazy scene of Impression, Sunrise strayed from traditional landscape painting and classic, idealized beauty. Paul Smith suggested that with this style, Monet meant to express "other beliefs about artistic quality which might be tied to the ideologies being consolidated by the emergent bourgeoisie from which he came." Loose brush strokes meant to suggest the scene rather than to mimetically represent it demonstrate the emergent Impressionist movement. In the wake of an emergent
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industrialization in France, this style expressed innovative individuality. Considering this, Smith claims that "Impression, Sunrise was about Monet's search for spontaneous expression, but was guided by definite and historically specific ideas about what spontaneous expression was." The group of studies made from Monet's hotel room was made from canvas with a base layer of gray in different tones. The layered effect provides depth in spite of imprecise details,
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creating a rich and tangible environment that seems like Le Havre, though not an exact likeness. Gordon and Forge discuss boundaries and the use of color in Impression, Sunrise, claiming that sky and water in Impression, Sunrise are hardly distinguishable, boundaries between objects are not obvious, and the paint "becomes the place" and effect, the colors of the paint melding together in "its glooming, opalescent oneness, its foggy blankness,
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its featureless, expectant emptiness that resembles, for the painter, an empty, uninflected canvas." They comment that the accents of blue-gray and orange cutting through the haze "are like last-minute revelations that had to wait, not only for the particular glimmer of orange to burn its way through the fog and find its reflective path onto the water and Monet's eye but for the canvas itself, pregnant with the foggy space outside, to be ready to receive it."
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Although it may seem that the Sun is the brightest spot on the canvas, it is in fact, when measured with a photometer, the same brightness (or luminance) as the sky. Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, said "If you make a black and white copy of Impression: Sunrise, the Sun disappears [almost] entirely."
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Livingstone said that this caused the painting to have a very realistic quality, as the older part of the visual cortex in the brain — shared with the majority of other mammals — registers only luminance and not colour, so that the Sun in the painting would be invisible to it, while it is just the newer part of the visual cortex — only found in humans and other primates — which perceives colour. In an interview with Maurice Guillemot for La Revue Illustrée, Monet reflected on his
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handling of landscape like the port of Le Havre in consideration of the movement and the 1874 exhibition: "A landscape is only an impression, instantaneous, hence the label they've given us-- all because of me, for that matter. I'd submitted something done out of my window at Le Havre, sunlight in the mist with a few masts in the foreground jutting up from the ships below. They wanted a title for the catalog; it couldn't really pass as a view of Le Havre, so I answered:
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"Put down Impression." Out of that they got impressionism, and the jokes proliferated...."
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The painting was stolen from the Musée Marmottan Monet in 1985. Five masked gunmen with pistols entered the museum and stole nine paintings from the collection. All together they were valued at $12 million. A tip-off led to the arrest in Japan of a Yakuza gangster named Shuinichi Fujikuma, which then led to the recovery of the stolen paintings in a small villa in Corsica in December 1990. Impression, Sunrise has been back on display in Musée Marmottan Monet ever since.
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More than 40 years after boating became fashionable, Monet took great care with his depictions of boats of all descriptions. Here, he carefully crafts racing boats on the Seine - they competed at Argenteuil from the 1850s onward - and their magnificence in this masterpiece is a stunning portrayal. Many spectators were brought to Argenteuil for the racing by train - which linked the small rural community to the city.
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Regattas at Argenteuil, 1872 is one of around 170 that Monet created during his time in Argenteuil (where more than half include the Seine). He cleverly gives the water movement by fragmenting or separating his brushstrokes. He was seeking to provide the fluidity of the air and water but he did find the ever-changing light a challenge. Despite this, he always beautifully captured the nuances and the vibrancy of the subject and themes he worked
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on Both Monet and his contemporary, Renoir, were fascinated with the sails of the boats that they captured in their paintings. They would often paint the same boats from the same spot and sought to overlook the detail in favor of an abstract rendering of light. Many commentators believe that Monet and Renoir working together helped the two artists to take their creations to new and innovative plains that they may not have achieved if not spurred on by the other.
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Springtime or The Reader is an 1872 painting Claude Monet. It depicts his first wife, Camille Doncieux, seated reading beneath a canopy of lilacs. The painting is presently held by the Walters Art Museum. In this composition, Camille is seated serenely beneath a canopy of lilacs. Her face and form are in close focus, unlike later depictions which portray her as older and far less attractive.
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Sunlight peeks through the trees, creating patches of light on the ground and on her muslin dress. The painting represents an enchanting scene of domestic life. In this painting, Claude Monet uses his first wife, Camille Doncieux, as the model. Camille and Claude Monet were married in 1870. Before this time, she had been his mistress and served as a model for Monet's figurative paintings of the 1860s and 1870s. It is said that Camille
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possessed unusual talent as a model and was also used by Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet. Late in the year 1871, Monet and his family settled in Argenteuil, a village Northwest of Paris. The village was a popular resort for urban pleasure-seekers. Colleagues of Monet frequently joined him and the village became associated with Impressionism. In the spring of 1872, Monet painted a number of canvases in his garden,
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often showing Camille and Alfred Sisley's companion, Adélaïde-Eugénie Lescouezec. Springtime was on display at an exhibition organized by the Impressionists at Durand Ruel's Paris Gallery, from March 30 to April 30, 1876.
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Monet exhibited 18 works, in which six of them Camille had posed. During this exhibition, Springtime was given the more generic title of Woman Reading. Monet's second wife, Alice Hoschedé, ordered the complete destruction of pictures and mementos from Camille's life with Monet. Therefore, Camille's image almost solely survives on the basis of Monet's paintings.
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Boulevard des Capucines is an oil on canvas street scene painting of the famous Paris boulevard created in 1873. Boulevard des Capucines presented a genuine glimpse of Parisian life on a winter day, and the critic Ernest Chesneau claimed that Monet captured the elusive quality of movement with unprecedented skill.
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The painting captures a scene of the hustle and bustle of Parisian life from the studio of Monet's friend, the photographer Felix Nadar. Applying very little detail, Monet uses short, quick brushstrokes to create the "impression" of people in the city alive with movement. Critic Leroy was not pleased with these abstracted crowds, describing them as "black tongue-lickings."
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In Boulevard des Capucines, Monet used the Japanese mobile viewpoint to embody the fragmentary, yet dynamic modern experiences of space as the eye plunges into the deep channel of the crowded street, and seeks to disentangle the clues to the complex visual experiences given by a myriad detached brushstrokes. Fragmentation is also created by the double perspective thrust formed by the apartment
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blocks on the left and by the line of wintry trees and snow-topped cabs in the middle of the composition. Monet has also isolated his figures on the snow-covered pavements, but his brushstrokes fuse them into groups, just as a crowd melds the movements of many individuals. Boulevard des Capucines, a painting of the boulevard done from the photographer Nadar's apartment at number 35. Monet painted the subject twice and it is uncertain
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which of the two pictures, the one now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, or that at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (shown here) was the painting that appeared in the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition, though more recently the Moscow picture has been favoured.
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The Seine at Asnières is an 1873 oil on canvas painting now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It was previously in the collection of Alice Meyer (née Sieveking), widow of the extremely rich Hamburg businessman Eduard Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer before being looted by the USSR after World War II and retained as war reparations. It has been on public display since an exhibition in 1995. Painted a few months after producing Impression, Sunrise, it shows a late afternoon scene with
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péniches moored at Asnières on the Seine to the north-west of Paris. The small town had recently been linked by rail to Paris via gare Saint-Lazare and was starting to industrialise, with a population of workers and lower-middle-class inhabitants building themselves houses in gritstone or brick, some of which are shown with tree gardens on the opposite bank in the painting. Living at Argenteuil,
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another town on the Seine slightly to the north, Monet came to paint the subject with his friends.
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The Poppy Field near Argenteuil (Coquelicots) is an oil-on-canvas landscape painting completed in 1873. Following its donation to the French state in 1906 by Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, it was housed successively in the Louvre, Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Jeu de Paume. It has been exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris since 1986.
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This painting, probably painted in the vicinity of Argenteuil, then a rural area, depicts a large field, with poppies dominating the left-hand side. In the foreground is a woman with a parasol and straw hat, accompanied by a child. In the middle ground, we see a couple similar to the first. The background, at the far end of the field, consists of a row of trees, with a house visible. The two mother-child couples mark out an oblique structuring the
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painting. The left half is dominated by red and the right by a blue-green. The woman in the foreground is probably Camille Doncieux, the artist's wife, accompanied by a young Jean Monet, who, born in 1867, would be six years old in this scene. The colourful landscape of the region allowed the artist to work en plein air, which he had already experimented with in early works. This painting reveals how passionate Monet was about his use of vibrant colours, as shown by
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the lurid blobs of red to depict the poppies, which are scattered across lush green fields.
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Claude Monet painted The Poppy Field near Argenteuil in 1873 on his return from the United Kingdom (in 1871) when he settled in Argenteuil with his family until 1878. It was a time that provided the artist with great fulfillment as a painter, despite the failing health of Camille. Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet's art dealer, helped support him during this time, where he found great comfort from the picturesque landscapes that surrounded him and provided him with plenty
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of subject matter from which to choose. It was a time that Monet's Plein air works would develop, and this particular painting was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. Acquired by the art merchant Paul Durand-Ruel, it then passed into the property of the painter Ernest Duez, the singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure, and the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton. It became property
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of the French state by the donation of Moreau-Nélaton in 1906. First held by the Département des Peintures of the Louvre Museum, it is currently assigned to the Musée d'Orsay.
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The Grand Quai at Le Havre is an incomplete 1874 oil on canvas painting, now in the Otto Krebs collection at the Hermitage Museum.
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Monet stayed in his birthplace of Le Havre in autumn 1874 to prepare for a future exhibition. The work shows the city's Grand Quai (main quay) with its administrative offices, bales of merchandise and ships. He produced three other views of the city's port during his stay which are in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a private collection.
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Snow at Argenteuil (Rue sous la neige, Argenteuil) is an oil-on-canvas landscape painting and it is the largest of no fewer than eighteen works Monet painted of his home commune of Argenteuil while it was under a blanket of snow during the winter of 1874–1875. This painting—number 352 in Wildenstein's catalogue of the works of Monet—is the largest of the eighteen. The attention to detail evident in the smaller paintings is less evident in this larger picture. Instead,
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Monet has rendered large areas of the canvas in closely like tones and colours of blue and grey. The application of smaller strokes of greens, yellows, reds and darker blues breaks up these large expanses, and the almost choreographed dispersal of these various colours helps bind the picture together. Paint at the depicted road surface is thicker than elsewhere in the painting, and impasto is suggestive of the feel of disturbed snow.
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Most of Monet's Snow at Argenteuil pictures from the winter of 1874–1875 were painted from locations close to the house on the boulevard Saint-Denis (now number 21 boulevard Karl Marx) into which Monet and his family had just moved. This particular painting shows the boulevard Saint-Denis looking in the direction of the junction with the rue de la Voie-des-Bans, with the river Seine out of sight to the rear, and the local railway station behind Monet's back as he painted.
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In December 1879 the painting was acquired from Monet by Théodore Duret. Recalling a conversation with the artist Édouard Manet, Duret years later reported that, 'One winter he [Manet] wanted to paint a snow scene. I had in my possession just such a piece from Monet. After seeing it, he said "It is perfect! I would not know how to do better", whereupon he gave up painting snow.' The
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picture was acquired from Duret by the art dealers Boussod, Valadon et Cie of Paris in 1892; then by Harris Whittemore of Naugatuck, Connecticut in 1893. Acquavella Galleries of New York acquired the painting in the early 1970s, and then it was purchased by Simon Sainsbury in or around 1973. It was bequeathed by him to the National Gallery, London, in 2006 and it has remained there since.
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The Train in the Snow, or Le train dans la neige, is a landscape painting depicts a train surrounded by snow at the Argenteuil station in France. Art historians see the work as a significant example of Monet's efforts to integrate nature and industry in his work. Many historians believe that Monet, out of all of the notable nineteenth century artists, made the most paintings of trains in his lifetime.
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Art historians typically emphasize the dividing lines of the piece created by the fence, trees, and tracks as well as the dark smoke produced by the locomotive. However, these historians derive different meanings from the painting, though they overall reference themes of industry and motion. Scholars also note the important connections between Monet's painting and contemporary works of literature, particularly those of Emile Zola.
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The painting depicts a steam-driven train arriving at Argenteuil Station, where many travelers are gathered on the platform waiting to board. As in most of Monet's snowscapes at Argenteuil, the composition of The Train in the Snow is animated by figures who serve to enliven the cold landscape. The signal man, for example, prepares for the train's departure as he stands towards the front of the engine, adjacent to the stop sign on the platform.
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Monet's use of color brings the composition together. Art historian and curator Marianne Delafond focuses her analysis of the painting on the smoke that billows from the dark train; she describes the smoke as "belching" outward from the train and blending into the "sky as cold and grey as the snow covering the track." Similarly, literary scholar Marian Robinson describes the smoke as a kind of "bas-relief against the duller sky." However, the smoke is not monochromatic as
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there are hints of purple within the mist. Other hints of color present within the painting include red and yellow lights emanating from the dark locomotive. The red, focused most intensely at the front of the train, seems to "bloody the snow." The yellow lights, in contrast, are not only brightly painted on the front of the engine, but appear at the vanishing point as well. The Train in the Snow was purchased from Monet by Doctor Georges de Bellio. De Bellio urged Monet
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to sell it to him or keep it himself as he was afraid that the painting would "fall into the hands of a fool." After his successful purchase, the doctor loaned The Train in the Snow to a Monet exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1883, where it attracted much positive attention from critics. In 1940, the painting was donated to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris by Bellio's daughter and son-in-law, Victorine and Don Eugene Donop de Monchy, where it remains today.
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Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, sometimes known as The Stroll (La Promenade) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet from 1875. The Impressionist work depicts his wife Camille Monet and their son Jean Monet in the period from 1871 to 1877 while they were living in Argenteuil, capturing a moment on a stroll on a windy summer's day.
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Monet's light, spontaneous brushwork creates splashes of colour. Mrs Monet's veil is blown by the wind, as is her billowing white dress; the waving grass of the meadow is echoed by the green underside of her parasol. She is seen as if from below, with a strong upward perspective, against fluffy white clouds in an azure sky. A boy, Monet's seven-year-old son Jean, is placed further away, concealed behind a rise in the ground and visible only from the waist up,
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creating a sense of depth, the moment using animated brush strokes full of vibrant color. The work is a genre painting of an everyday family scene, not a formal portrait. The work was painted outdoors, en plein air, and quickly, probably in a single period of a few hours. It measures 100 × 81 centimetres, Monet's largest work in the 1870s, and is signed "Claude Monet 75" in the lower right corner.
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The painting was one of 18 works by Monet exhibited at the second Impressionist exhibition in April 1876, at the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. Ten years later, Monet returned to a similar subject, painting a pair of scenes featuring his second wife's daughter Suzanne Monet in 1886 with a parasol in a meadow at Giverny; they are in the Musée d'Orsay. John Singer Sargent saw the painting at the exhibition in 1876 and was
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later inspired to create a similar painting, Two Girls with Parasols at Fladbury, in 1889. Monet sold the painting in November 1876 to Georges de Bellio, Monet's Homeopath, who was regularly paid in Monet's paintings. It was inherited by de Bellio's daughter Victorine and her husband Ernest Donop de Monchy, acquired by Georges Menier in Paris, and sold in 1965 to Paul Mellon and his wife Bunny Mellon. He donated the painting to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1983.
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