Claude Monet. Nina Kalitina

of artists born between the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. Almost fifty years separated them from the Impressionists. The Barbizon painters had been the first to paint landscapes after nature. It was only fitting that Renoir met Diaz in Fontainebleau forest. The young painters of the Barbizon School were making traditional classic landscapes, but by the 1830s this activity no longer satisfied them. The Parisian Théodore Rousseau had fallen in love with landscape in his youth while travelling throughout France with his father. According to his biographer: “One day, on his own and without telling anyone, he purchased paints and brushes and went to the hill of Montmartre, at the foot of the old church that carried the aerial telegraph tower, and there he began to paint what he saw before him: the monument, the cemetery, the trees, the walls, and terrain that rose up there. In a few days, he finished a solid detailed study with a very natural tonality. This was the sign of his vocation.” (A. Sensier, Théodore Rousseau, Paris, 1872, p. 17).

      Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur, 1865.

      Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 150.5 cm.

      The Norton Simon Foundation, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

      The Port of Honfleur, c. 1866.

      Oil on canvas.

      Private collection.

      The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, 1867

      Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 102.5 cm.

      The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

      Rousseau began painting “what he saw before him” in Normandy, in the mountains of the Auvergne, in Saint-Cloud, Sèvres, and Meudon. His first brush with fame was the Salon of 1833, well before the birth of the future Impressionists, when his View on the Outskirts of Granville (The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) caused a sensation due to its focus on a mediocre, rustic motif. A contemporary critic wrote that this landscape “is among the most realistic and warmest in tone of anything the French School has ever produced.” (A. Sensier, op. cit., p. 38). Rousseau had discovered a sleepy little village called Barbizon at the entrance of the forest of Fontainebleau. There he was joined by his friend Jules Dupré and the aforementioned Narcisse Diaz de la Peña. Another of Rousseau’s painter friends who often worked at Barbizon was Constant Troyon. In the late 1840s, Jean-François Millet, known for his paintings of the French peasantry, moved to Barbizon with his large family. Thus was born the group of landscape painters that came to be known as the Barbizon School. However, these landscape artists only executed studies in the forest and fields, from which they subsequently composed their paintings in the studio. Charles-François Daubigny, who also sometimes worked at Barbizon, took the idea further than the others. He established himself at Auvers on the banks of the Oise and built a studio-barge he called the Bottin. Then the painter sailed the river, stopping wherever he wished to paint the motif directly before him. This working method enabled him to give up traditional composition and to base his colour on the observation of nature. Daubigny would later support the future Impressionists when he was a jury member of the Salon. But Camille Corot was perhaps the closest to the Impressionists. He was living in the village of Ville-d’Avray near Paris. With characteristic spontaneity, Corot painted the ponds near his house, the reflection in their water of weeping willows, and the shaded paths that led into the forest. Even if his landscapes evoked memories of Italy, Ville-d’Avray was recognisable. No one was more sensitive to nature than Corot. Within the range of a simple grey-green palette he produced the subtlest gradations of shadow and light. In Corot’s painting, colour played a minor role; its luminosity created a misty, atmospheric effect and a sad, lyrical mood. All these characteristics gave his landscapes the quality of visual reality and movement to which the Impressionists aspired.

      The Chailly Road through the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1865.

      Oil on canvas, 97 × 130.5 cm.

      Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen.

      Garden in Blossom at Sainte-Adresse, 1866.

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm.

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      Claude Monet – The Person

      Gustave Geffroy, the friend and biographer of Claude Monet, reproduced two portraits of the artist in his biography. In the first, painted by an artist of no particular distinction, Monet is eighteen years of age. A dark-haired young man in a striped shirt, he is perched astride a chair with his arms folded across its back. His pose suggests an impulsive and lively character; his face, framed by shoulder-length hair, shows both unease in the eyes and a strong will in the line of the mouth and the chin. Geffroy begins the second part of his book with a photographic portrait of Monet at the age of eighty-two. A stocky old man with a thick white beard stands confidently, his feet set wide apart; calm and wise, Monet knows the value of things and believed only in the undying power of art. It was not by chance that he chose to pose with a palette in his hand in front of a panel from the Waterlilies series. Numerous portraits of Monet have survived over the years – self-portraits, the works of his friends (Manet and Renoir among others), photographs by Carjat and Nadar – all of them reproducing his features at various stages in his life. Many literary descriptions of Monet’s physical appearance have come down to us as well, particularly after he had become well known and much in demand by art critics and journalists.

      How then does Monet appear to us? Take a photograph from the 1870s. He is no longer a young man but a mature individual with a dense black beard and moustache, only the top of his forehead hidden by closely-cut hair. The expression of his brown eyes is decidedly lively, and his face as a whole exudes confidence and energy. This is Monet at the time of his uncompromising struggle for new aesthetic ideals. Now take his self-portrait in a beret dating from 1886, the year that Geffroy met him on the island of Belle-Île off the south coast of Brittany. “At first glance,” Geffroy recalls, “I could have taken him for a sailor, because he was dressed in a jacket, boots and hat very similar to the sort that they wear. He would put them on as protection against the sea breeze and the rain.” A few lines later Geffroy writes: “He was a sturdy man in a sweater and beret with a tangled beard and brilliant eyes which immediately pierced into me.”

      In 1919, when Monet was living almost as a recluse at Giverny, not far from Vernon-sur-Seine, he was visited by Fernand Léger, who saw him as “a shortish gentleman in a panama hat and elegant light-grey suit of English cut… He had a large white beard, a pink face, little eyes that were bright and cheerful but with perhaps a slight hint of mistrust…” Both the visual and the literary portraits of Monet depict him as an unstable, restless figure. He was capable of producing an impression of boldness and audacity or he could seem, especially in the latter years of his life, confident and placid. But those who remarked on Monet’s calm and restraint were guided only by his external appearance. Both the friends of his youth, Bazille, Renoir, Cézanne, Manet, and the visitors to Giverny who were close to him – first and foremost Gustave Geffroy, Octave Mirbeau and Georges Clemenceau – were well aware of the attacks of tormenting dissatisfaction and nagging self-doubt to which he was prone. His gradually mounting annoyance and discontent with himself would frequently find an outlet in acts of unbridled and elemental fury, when Monet would destroy dozens of canvases, scraping off the paint, cutting them up into pieces, and sometimes even burning them. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, to whom Monet was bound by contract, received a whole host of letters from him requesting that the date for a showing of paintings be deferred. Monet would write that he had “not only scraped off, but simply torn up” the studies he had begun. He would say that for his own satisfaction it was essential to make alterations, and that the results he had achieved were “incommensurate with the amount of effort expended”, that he was in “a bad mood” or would even go so far as to say that he was “no good for anything.”

      Bazille and Camille (study for Déjeuner sur l’Herbe), 1865.

      Oil on canvas, 93 × 68.9 cm.

      National