AFA Winter 2019

Winter 100 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Fig. 5: Claude Monet (1840–1926), La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide, 1865. Oil on canvas, 35½ x 59¼ inches. Courtesy Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Tex. (AP 1968.07). Fig. 4: Claude Monet (1840–1926), View of Bordighera, 1884. Oil on canvas, 26 x 323⁄16 inches. The Armand Hammer Collection: Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. to the artist’s practice; to Durand-Ruel he admits on October 28, 1886, that “although I am the man of the sun, as you say, one should not specialize in a single note.”  2 And in a letter to Alice, written on the same day, he is even more candid: “This evening I have received some money from Durand, and, like you, he seems decidedly uneasy to see me paint such a sad place; and now, after having talked about going to America, he advises me to come back and spend the winter in the South, because, he says, my business is the sun. Well! We will end up boring me with the sun! We must do everything, and that is why I am happy to do what I do.”  3 More than any other impressionist, Monet explored the different moods of nature, unafraid of abandoning the light color palette associated with the Impressionist movement and tailoring his chromatic choices to his emotional response. This exhibition shows the changing quality of nature: its light, colors, and natural elements. Monet understood that it is not just the place itself, but rather the unique and distinctive light and atmospheric conditions of such a place—what in French he called the “ enveloppe ”—that revealed the specific character of a site.