The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: Claude Monet
Claude Monet's various painting campaigns, both in the rural towns in which he settled (Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Giverny) and on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany (Étretat, Belle-Île), produced countless landscape images that have become synonymous with Impressionism. Monet's campaigns had begun in earnest with the Saint-Lazare Station compositions of 1877, and were continued in his systematic 'mappings' of Vétheuil from his houseboat in 1878-79. It has frequently been argued that the débâcle, or 'break-up of ice' paintings of January 1880 consolidated his commitment to painting a sustained series of works utilizing a single motif.
In his restless quest for new and unspoiled subjects to paint, Claude Monet set out in 1886 for the rugged, windswept island of Belle-Île-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany. This was a turning point for Monet. It is in the Belle-Île paintings that we find the genesis of what was effectively a prototype for Monet's later series paintings. Monet was particularly taken with the rawness and unpredictability of Belle-Île's jagged coastline, which was lashed constantly by storm and spray. Monet's descriptions in his letters of the raging tempests and seething seas that he was attempting to paint on Belle-Île disturbed his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, who counselled the artist to return to mainland France and paint scenery of a sunnier aspect. This notion was anathema to Monet, however, who had become enraptured by the island's 'satanic sea'.
Beginning in the summer of 1890, and working through the following autumn and winter in a field adjacent to his property at Giverny, Monet painted some twenty-five in all of his now legendary Haystack canvases. Within the series, this motif is depicted not only across seasons and widely differing climatic conditions, but also at different times of the day. These effects are not lessened by the fact that most of the canvases are 'constructs', partly painted before nature and then finished in the artist's studio.
