AFA Winter 2019

Antiques & Fine Art 101 2019 By focusing more and more on fewer sites, where he could study the changes of light during an extended period, he allowed himself to truly comprehend the spirit of a place. He wrote about this from Bordighera on March 25, 1884: “You have to live in a place for a while to paint it, you have to have worked hard to render it accurately.”  4 A few years later, from Belle-Île, he wrote on October 30, 1886, that “to really paint the sea, you have to see it every day, at every hour in the same spot to understand its ways in that place.”  5 The exhibition’s sections ref lect Monet’s desire to seek both familiar and unfamiliar locales. After his youth in Normandy, where he grew up surrounded by lush countryside and the examples of artists like Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind (Fig. 5), Monet moved to Paris, whose bustling boulevards (Fig. 6) and manicured public parks offered plenty of painting opportunities for young artists who sought to engage with the newly urban and modern world around them. Later sections address his years in Argenteuil, a fashionable escape for city dwellers only fifteen minutes by train from Paris, where he resided from 1871 to 1878; and Vétheuil, a rural village whose natural surroundings inspired Monet toward pure landscapes devoid of human presence. Trips to the dramatic cliffs of the Normandy coast and the “sinister” rocks of the island of Belle-Île, off the cost of Brittany, alternated with sojourns in the South of France, in particular, Bordighera and Antibes on the Riviera. Here, the enchanting light and exotic vegetation of the Mediterranean was unlike anything he had experienced before, and he produced a number of landscape paintings for which he felt he needed jewel-like colors to render accurately the buildings, palm trees, and azure water: “I’ve caught this magical Fig. 7: Claude Monet (1840–1926), Haystacks, Midday, 1890. Oil on canvas, 25⅝ x 39⅜ inches. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: Purchased 1979 (NGA 79.16). Fig. 6: Claude Monet (1840–1926), Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-1874. Oil on canvas, 31⅝ x 23¾ inches. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: the Kenneth A. and Helen F. Spencer Foundation Acquisition Fund (F72-35). Photo courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services / Jamison Miller.