Claude Monet (1840-1926) was among the most prominent and influential founders
of the Impressionist movement. Born Oscar-Claude Monet, he began selling satirical
cartoons in his native town of Le Havre when he was 15 (see lot 21). Occasionally
subversive and lewd, the cartoons sold for between 10 and 20 francs and the young
Oscar became recognized locally for his witty caricatures. When Monet was 18, he
met the artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him how use oils
and to paint
en plein air
.
After numerous rejections of his more ambitious works from the traditionalist, annual
Paris Salon, Monet joined Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir and others (whom he had
met through the Paris studio of his teacher Charles Gleyre) in establishing the
Independent Salon in 1874. One of Monet’s exhibited works,
Impression: Soleil Levant
,
1873, now in the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, received criticism for its loose
handling and general unfinished appearance, however it was this painting that
inspired the use of the term “Impressionism” and the group of artists to begin
referring to themselves as “Impressionists.”
Monet went on to develop his distinctive Impressionist style and began painting
multiple large scale canvases of the same outdoor scenes at different times of the day
in order to capture the changing lighting effects (as he did with haystacks in the fields,
the facade of Rouen Cathedral and views of the Thames River in London). His gardens
at Giverny, north of Paris, became the focus of his paintings for the last 20 years of his
career and his country estate became a hub for the younger generation of artists (a
group of American Impressionists among them) to come and study his technique.
Monet was already well known in America long before the Armory Show; his works
were first introduced in 1883 at the Foreign Exhibition in Boston, and then even more
successfully in 1886 with a major exhibition organized by the prominent Parisian
gallery Durand-Ruel and shown at the Artist Association of America gallery in New
York (which also included paintings by Pissarro, Degas, Seurat, Renoir, Morisot and
others). Monet’s style and technique were shared directly with American artists
beginning around 1886 when the first colony of painters came to stay with him in
Giverny, including Theodore Robinson (1852-1896), who also exhibited in the Armory
Show. By 1913, Impressionist techniques were employed actively by numerous
American artists including those associated with The Ten (lots 141-147).
Monet was included in the Realist category of Arthur B. Davies’ chronology and his
works were exhibited in Gallery O with the rest of the Impressionists (namely Pissarro,
Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Cassatt and Manet) and Post Impressionists (Seurat and
Toulouse-Lautrec). The Parisian gallery Durand-Ruel was responsible for lending the
five works by Monet to the Armory Show, one of which,
Autumn à Jeofosse
, 1884, is
currently in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the most expensive of which,
Effet
de Neige, Giverny
, 1879, was listed for sale at $11,000 (roughly $260,000 today)
though it evidently found no interested buyers.
