The Everyday Lives of the French Impressionists

the almost truthful letters a young Impressionist sent home

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

One of the frequent reports of life among the young painters who would be one day called the Impressionists are the letters sent home to his mother and father by Monet's best friend, the painter Jean Frédéric Bazille. Bazille came from a well-to-do family in Montpellier and moved to Paris to study medicine. After telling his family repeatedly that his medical exams were once more postponed, he confessed all he wanted to do was paint! (It was a big distraction to study anatomy when Renoir and Monet and Manet and Pissarro were in the other room of the studio talking painting!) From his letters we learn something of the joyous life of these young men, and Bazille's constant avoidance of his parents' attempts to marry him off. He was a very good person and rushed off to fight for France in the Franco-Prussian wars to a disastrous outcome.

This self-portrait from the Chicago Art Institute is rather strange; he was only about 24 or 25, and painted himself at least fifteen years older. Or perhaps it is the tension of staring at himself in the mirror or some discomfort about himself which made him paint that way. Various paintings and photos of him show him as dashingly handsome, humble while painting at his easel, and very much the formidable son of a great family in still another. The first drafts of my novel CLAUDE & CAMILLE featured Bazille as the main character; he later moved to third major character. I have many books about him, perhaps all that have been published in English and a few in French.

Reading about Pissarro's family

2011-10-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

I arrived at the Clark Museum to speak about my novel the week after they took down their exquisite exhibit Pissarro's People, but I did get a copy of the excellent exhibition book. I was particularly struck at how much he loved his children and with what an atmosphere of unconditional love he raised them. He lost three of them before his own death; Jeanne, called Minette (shown right), died when she was nine. There are many portraits of her, from an enchanting little girl to a somber and sickly one. I don't know how she died or if any record is left. It was devastating for Pissarro and his wife.

The exhibition book is a fine portrait of the man as well as the painter...this most tender, humble painter! I would have loved to have known him.

Monet and storms at sea

2011-08-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

The painter Turner, it is said, had himself tied to a mast to observe the violence of a storm at sea. Monet had his own near disaster. Standing on a rock to paint and very involved, he was suddenly swept into the churning sea by a wave. He was a Normandy man and a strong swimmer but his canvases and palette and paints rushed about him in the water. He climbed to safety with a beard tinged with colorful oil paint; one could say that that day Monet was himself a Monet. As today we are waiting for the hurricane to approach New York City, I felt inspired to post one of his paintings of storms! He did not do as many as Turner, though!

2011-07-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Clark Museum in Williamstown Mass. is hosting a Pissarro exhibition through October 2nd...and sadly I won't see it, because I am not speaking there on my Monet novel until October 9th. I love Pissarro with all my heart! If someone does go, please do leave a comment here. Here is the url for the museum: CLARK MUSEUM. And let me once more recommend Pissarro's Letters to his Son Lucien.

a new documentary on Monet: MONET'S PALATE

2011-03-27T16:23:00.000-07:00

I am always surprised and delighted at how many things one can discover on the web, and the other day I came across a Facebook page for this documentary about Monet's food and gardens and paintings, featuring many great chefs with an introduction by Meryl Streep herself. MONET's PALATE, shot entirely in Paris, London and Giverny, includes exclusive footage of Monet's home in Normandy where he lived for over 40 years, including shots of the dining room where he entertained guests such as Marcel Proust and Paul Cezanne. The documentary also features Monet's paintings on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a select group of world famous chefs like Daniel Boulud, Alice Waters, Michel Richard and Roger Vergé prepare Monet's favorite meals.

Also see Monet's Palate (the general website) for all sorts of wonderful things about the movie, the meals, the creators of the film.

Did Alice really destroy all of Camille's letters? A 19th century soap opera!

2011-03-10T17:04:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Guardian has declared that Monet's second wife, Alice, destroyed all of the personal papers of Monet's first wife and muse, the lovely Camille, who died at the age of 32 from cancer. The whole situation of Monet's relationship with Alice Hoschede, his patron's wife, is shrouded in mystery to this day, I told the story as I believed it in CLAUDE & CAMILLE, and yet it was strange even to the Parisians of the day. When Alice's wealthy husband became bankrupt, Monet took Alice and her six children to live with him in his drafty house forty miles from Paris. Some people say he was already her lover, but it would be strange for Alice cared for the dying Camille, even arranging a Catholic wedding for Claude and Camille a few days before she died. Was this then the woman who supposed destroyed poor Camille's personal papers? If so she was a complicated woman indeed! She left diaries but they are unpublished. I would love to read them. Book clubs often ask me how much of the novel is true. How can you look into the complicated heart of anyone, and be clear about what they did in private more than 130 years ago? Or maybe when Alice and Claude moved in haste to Giverny, they left Camille's papers behind along with many unpaid bills...

The picture of Alice is by Carulus-Duran who also painted Claude Monet when they were both students; it was painted when Alice was still a wealthy woman in her chateau, never dreamingof falling in love with a painter who would remove her to the remote town of Giverny.

Happy 170th birthday, dearest Renoir!

2011-02-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

Auguste Renoir would have been 170 years old this coming February 25th, having been born in 1841. His father was a tailor and as a boy he slept on the tailor's bench, sometimes being stuck by the odd dropped pin; at thirteen he went to work in a workshop, painting floral designs on plates. (Oh, in what dusty Paris antique shop can we find an unsigned plate from about 1854 painted by the hand of the young Renoir?)

I am struck always by his loving and sweet nature, much like his paintings. He said, “The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion. It is the current which he puts forth, which sweeps you along in his passion.”

He also said, "I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that" and then, "Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world!"

Happy birthday to this tender, gifted impressionist! He is one of Claude Monet's best friends in my novel CLAUDE & CAMILLE and the hero of Susan Vreeland's LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY.

Berthe Morisot's teacher, "Papa" Corot

2011-01-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

Corot taught the young Berthe Morisot and in the 1860s introduced her to plein air painting. I have always loved his work, and indeed he greatly influenced the young Berthe's style. He was by that time well into his sixties, a generous man with a mane of gray hair who willingly lent his pupils some of his paintings to take home and copy. Berthe's mother coaxed him into the social circle at her house; he was a shy bachelor and unwilling to come until Madame Morisot agreed to let him smoke his pipe during dessert. They called him "Papa" Corot.

Corot stood strongly behind the young Monet and Pissarro as well. The photograph of him shown was taken by Nadar, who lent his old photography studio at 35 boulevard des Capucines for the first Exhibition of Impressionism in 1874. Corot did not take part in the Exhibition though he had influenced and taught many of its painters.

Monet's Christmas lunch

2011-01-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

Almost everyone who has journeyed to the master's house in Giverny comes away with a vision not only of the flower gardens but the glorious yellow dining room. We imagine ourselves invited to eat there with the master. Dinner was punctual; Monet would have been up tramping fields to paint since before dawn and was very hungry. He was also very particular. Asparagus was hardly cooked; he covered his salad and much else with almost spoonfuls of black pepper.

In Claire Joyes' fascinating book, Monet's Table, I found some enticing details about Christmas dinner at Giverny. It was served at midday and the dining room was bedecked with garlands of leaves and flowers while table bowls held clusters of Christmas roses and jasmine. Children would find little gray envelopes lined with rose madder at their places containing money from Monet and his wife. There were also mysterious little packets of sweets and small gifts such as pins, medallions and pocket watches. The large presents were waiting under the tree in the dining room.

The meal began with eggs scrambled with truffles or monkfish. Strasbourg truffled foie gras in pastry was served before the truffled, stuffed capon...etc. etc. Lastly there was a lit Christmas pudding and banana ice cream. And to think Monet lived on a sack of beans for a few months in his mid twenties while sharing a studio with Renoir. And they were not truffled beans, I am sure!

(I searched in vain for a Christmas post for this blog and found one two weeks late but here it is! Do get a copy of the book and cook some of the many recipes at the back of it!)

Van Gogh is a fascinating subject for novelists!

2010-11-27T17:56:00.000-08:00

The Van Gogh novels I have read so far are:

LUST FOR LIFE by Irving Stone (1934) which portrays his whole artistic life until his death at 37;
SUNFLOWERS by Sheramy Bundrick (2009), the last few months of his life from the point of view of a prostitute who loved him
THE LAST VAN GOGH by Alison Richman, his doctor's daughter's love for him in the last months of his life;
JOANNA by Clare Cooperstein (1995), about his brother Theo's wife and how she saw the artist;
and LEAVING VAN GOGH by Carol Wallace (2011), his last months from the point of view of his holistic doctor Dr. Gachet

The man is endlessly fascinating! If there are other novels about him, please leave a comment.

where the rejected Parisian painters went in 1863

2010-11-27T17:37:00.001-08:00

Oh the scandal! In 1863 Napoleon III instituted a Salon des Refusés where the painters who had been refused a place in the regular annual Salon could hang their work. Taking advantage of this was the young Edouard Manet with his now famous painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. The critic Théophile Burger wrote, "I fail to see what could have induced a distinguished and intelligent artist to adopt such an absurd composition."

At the date of this exhibition, Claude Monet was a handsome, dark-haired 23-year-old young recruit in the French army training grounds in Algiers...

Renoir paints Wagner - from the boating party luncheon to Parsifal

2010-10-24T19:11:00.000-07:00

It is rather odd for me to think of Renoir loving Wagner's music though other people may think differently! Renoir was about 42 when he traveled to Palermo to paint the composer who was there finishing Parsifal. Renoir had a rough time. First he could not find Wagner and then he met a young man in Wagner's household who told him the composer was in a state of nerves about finishing his opera (who wouldn't be?) and couldn't be disturbed. After a day or so Renoir did meet the Master who showed up in a velvet dressing gown with wide sleeves lined with satin. In the end the great composer gave the great artist 35 minutes to sketch him! Renoir returned to Paris and made his painting. Wagner was disappointed that Renoir was not Ingres!

Only the year before, the congenial Renoir had painted his delightful Luncheon of the Boating Party.

New book on Monet's Camille published!

2010-08-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Finally! MONET AND HIS MUSE: CAMILLE MONET IN THE ARTIST's LIFE is available on Amazon. I have been waiting a long time for this critical study by esteemed clinical psychologist and art historian Mary Mathews Gedo. When I began to write my novel I wrote to the foremost American scholar on Monet and I asked, "What can you tell me about Camille?" and he said, "Very little." I am so excited to read this!

From the publisher's description: "And then—Camille. Entering Monet’s life when he was still a young man, becoming first his model and then mistress and then—finally—his wife, Camille Doncieux always fulfilled the function of muse, even after her life had ended, as Monet not only painted her one last time on her deathbed, but preserved her memory through the gardens he planted at his home in Giverny." That was just how I saw it as I wrote, with only scraps of diaries and his portraits of her and a few mentions in their friends' letters to guide me.

Amazon link for the scholarly book is above and here is the link to my novel CLAUDE & CAMILLE: A NOVEL OF MONET for a fictional treatment of this long-lost muse.

Berthe Morisot's last letter to her daughter Julie

2010-08-11T21:03:00.000-07:00

The beautiful and exquisitely talented Berthe Morisot had already been widowed for some time and was raising her only daughter Julie with the help of friends. Julie was only seventeen when her mother, fatally ill with pneumonia, left her this last heart-rending letter:

"My little Julie, I love you as I die. I will still love you even when I am dead...I had hoped to live until you were married. Work and be good as you have always been; you have not caused me one sorrow in your little life. Do not cry; I love you more than I can tell you...."

115 years after it was written, the love of the great artist for her only child moves me very deeply.

Such very good friends! -- life among the impressionists

2010-07-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here is the young Renoir curled up in a chair in his good pal Frederic Bazille's studio. One of the reasons I was compelled to write Claude and Camille: a novel of Monet was my fascination for the friendship among these then utterly unknown artists, particularly in the 1860s and 1870s when Monet had likely never heard of a water lily; he was fortunate to have a humble potted plant in the rooms he lived in! The young impressionists (who had never heard the word impressionists then either) slept on each others floors, painted the same model side by side, scrounged paint and scraped down canvases and shared dreams. It is interesting to me that often a creative person rises in a creative group. A fascinating nonfiction book is the Private Lives of the Impressionists. And a tender novel about Renoir which I recommended some months ago is Susan Vreeland's Luncheon of the Boating Party. Both capture the unique friendship of these talented men and women.

the personal things Renoir left behind

2010-07-01T20:40:00.001-07:00

I am only allowed in this generous blogspot to post in one image per each blog. I did find a treasure trove of personal things Renoir left behind listed in Hantmann's Auctioneers and appraisers. I chose the wedding certificate to his beloved Aline and then found so many other things on the site that you can go look for yourself and perhaps put a nice bid on Aline's beautiful fringed kimono. I coveted Renoir's spectacles. I wonder what strength they were?

I have a strong affinity as a historical novelist to touch objects worn by those figures I so love. I think it would be wonderful to see Monet's bedroom slippers. I have to look on line!

Here is the Hantmann's link if you wish to go shopping among the misc. things left by the impressionists. Would anyone have Manet's famous opera hat and cane?

http://www.liveauctioneers.com/ebay/hantmans_renoir5.htm

Eugene Boudin, Monet's first teacher

2010-07-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

I think I may have posted something about this fine man and artist here before, but a Twitter friend directed me to a NPR site with this photo and I wanted to share it. If I might quote from the story:

Boudin didn't start out to be a painter. His father ran a ferryboat between Honfleur and Le Havre, the big English Channel port, and Boudin worked on the boat as a child. "And one day he fell overboard and was caught by one seaman," says Bridget Mueller, who guides visitors around Normandy. "Otherwise he would have drowned — so his mother said, 'You're not going on this ship again.' "

Instead, young Eugene went to school. A teacher spotted artistic talent, and from then on, Boudin went to sea via the canvases he painted. Mueller says there's hidden proof of the artist's seamanship: a notation on the back of every painting, recording the weather and the winds on the day it was made.

It was Boudin who challenged the 17-year-old arrogant Claude Monet to try landscape painting and the rest is history. Claude never looked back. Even in his old age, he referred to Boudin as "my master." The whole story can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128174560

the later years of Claude Monet

2010-06-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

I went down to the Gagosian Gallery in New York City which is exhibiting a rare and stunning collection of late Monet paintings through June 26th. If you are in the area, please go down and see it. I went with a few friends, one who is a painter, and we spent at least an hour in the several rooms. The painting I show here from 1906 is bucolic but most of the paintings around 1914-1919 are not. How could they be? The artist's eyesight was failing him; he had lived through the ravages of World War I in which his sons and the sons of his good friend Renoir had fought. Death had taken his beloved second wife Alice and his older son Jean as well as his beautiful stepdaughter Susanne whose portrait on a hill is the cover for my novel CLAUDE & CAMILLE. The old friends he had loved had died or were far from him and his work, which has seemed so radical in 1865, was now old style. More and more he stayed within his house and gardens, finding contentment there. And still he did not "cease from exploration" as T.S. Eliot writes.

Do go if you are in the New York City area. Several pictures are from private collections and may not be easily seen again. I hope to go again myself before it closes.

My intense love for Monet's best friend Frédéric

2010-05-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

On visiting the Metropolitan Museum exhibition The Origins of Impressionism fifteen years ago (which was the original inspiration of my novel Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet), I must confess that the painting I fell in love with was an early Monet but the painter I felt I had to know was Frédéric Bazille, the tall medical student from Montpellier who had to paint, who was brilliant, charming, the best of friends and rather self-effacing. He came from a wealthy family and when his friends Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, and Claude Monet needed a place to paint or sleep, he gave away every corner of his floor. In one letter when away from the studio he wrote Renoir to search Frédéric's bedroom drawer for Frédéric's pocket watch and pawn it.

We have a great many of the letters he wrote home to his parents whose financial support he needed through his 20s as he made nothing from his art and after what was obviously evasions and lies (how many time could he tell his parents that his medical exams were yet again postponed which was why he hadn't exactly passed them!), he fell happily into a full time life in the arts. He was an excellent amateur actor and playwright, a passionate classical pianist, and the world's best friend. He did not live very long and the others mourned him forever. For a time he was the main character in my novel until Monet took over and then Camille.

This photograph was taken when he was about 24 years old; at that time he was modeling for Monet as a favor and painting at his side, but his style was really not impressionism. It was a gorgeous style just his own and he had hardly begun to develop it when his years were ended. I felt from the first time I saw his picture that I loved him.

THE WOMEN IN MONET's GARDEN

2010-04-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

There were five major women in Monet's gardens: his mother, Camille, Alice, Suzanne and Blanche. Read about them in my blog at Linus's Blanket and how they influenced him.

http://www.linussblanket.com/women-monets-garden-stephanie-cowell/

more on Manet's elusive model Victorine Meurent

2010-04-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

Who were the models for the impressionists? Often a mistress or a wife or a step-daughter (Monet had four), someone you did not have to pay by the hour. Young and pretty girls got the highest fees. In the 1860s when the impressionists were mostly still in their 20s, all you had to do was wander over to the Pigalle fountain and find a model for they collected there.

There are many fascinating things about Victorine. Manet first saw her walking in the street carrying her guitar. She taught violin and guitar, sang in café-concerts, and painted. She was obviously intelligent and made her way the best as she could in a world where unprotected women had a hard time financially. She went her own way artistically and in 1876 one of her paintings was accepted by the prestigious state Salon while Manet’s was rejected. She continued to model, even for Toulouse-Lautrec. When Manet died, she wrote a polite letter to Manet’s widow, saying that the painter had promised to remember her in his will. As far as we know, Madame Manet did not answer.

All but one of Victorine’s own paintings has been lost. I think she must have been a fascinating woman who went her own way. She is the subject of two novels: A Woman with No Clothes On and Mademoiselle Victorine.

Monet's blue angel and stepdaughter

2010-03-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

Blanche Monet was an adolescent when she and her five siblings moved into Monet's drafty house in Vétheuil, accompanying her married mother Alice who was then falling in love with the highly masculine painter. Almost at once the young Blanche was following Monet to paint and was soon painting on her own in a style much like the man who became her stepfather.

Not only was the caring Blanche a stepdaughter, but when she grew up she became daughter-in-law as well to Monet, marrying his chemist son Jean. When Jean died far too young, Blanche moved to Giverny to care for Monet in his old age. In those years she did not paint herself. She resumed her art after her stepfather's death and had a few solo exhibitions of her delicate paintings. When the bombs of World War II fell, Blanche wrote to Count Metternich asking him to protect the house and an official notice was tacked to the door, saying, "This is Monet's house. Forbidden to the forces of occupation."

If Blanche had not cared so intensely for the old Claude Monet, he might never have completed his great panels which hang in the Orangerie today. Thus the Prime Minister George Clemenceau dubbed her "The Blue Angel."

The picture is by Monet and shows Blanche and her sister as young girls; Blanche, of course, is absorbed in painting.

Berthe Morisot, the chaperoned young painter

2010-02-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

Not for the well-bred Berthe Morisot was the vigorous, bohemian life of the Café Guerbois where painters such as Monet, Manet, Renoir and Cézanne (all male, please note) gathered around a table to argue art and technique. Berthe would not have been allowed anywhere near those joyful meetings; she was a woman and of good family.

The daughter of a rising civil servant, Berthe lived in two worlds: her painting with which she was never satisfied and the suitable dinners and salons where her socially ambitious mother made certain that her three beautiful unmarried daughters were introduced to eligible men. So no cafe life for Berthe, no learning how to draw a figure in a drafty, dusty art class. Either her mother accompanied her and her gifted sister Edma to copy paintings at the Louvre or for art lessons with the genial, elderly Corot, or she and her sister went modestly together, chaperoning each other. A young woman could not go anywhere alone; her reputation might be compromised. It was not done.

But the world of the men who would be known as the Impressionists opened to her anyway. Manet's mother, Madame Manet, was socially desirable. She held a weekly Salon and it was likely there that the beautiful Berthe encountered the red-haired dandy Manet and became his colleague and model. Who knows what else she felt? Certainly she was a complex young woman.

a photograph of Claude Monet at just 20...

2010-02-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

Well, here is our Claude at about the age of twenty, perhaps a little younger. To me he looks a little uncomfortable to find himself in a photographer's studio, a little uncertain as to how he will appear. He is delightfully handsome. If he was twenty, he had been experimenting with landscape painting for three years and accumulated a good portfolio of chalk sketches of boats. (A book called The Unknown Monet has a great number of these.)

Looking at this picture now, we know the end of the story: the vast gardens at Giverny, the six stepchildren and two sons, the great fame. Who was he then, not wanting to go into his father's grocery business but escaping to Paris to follow art? We know how his story concludes and that even now, eighty-four years after his death, his art, which no one wanted at that time, is some of the most beloved in the world. We know this...but to the young man in this picture, the future with all its difficulties and joys was utterly unknown.

Sisley: a beloved, less famous Impressionist

2010-02-14T17:47:00.001-08:00

Alfred Sisley is known today as one of the minor impressionists and how dear he is to me! He was born to an English couple living in Paris and painted alongside Renoir, Monet and their generous friend Bazille. One of the fortunate painters, he was supported by his father, but the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 brought down the family silk business, and Alfred — who was no salesman— struggled for income until his death at not yet sixty. Claude Monet promised to look after Sisley's children, and shortly after his friend's death, organized a sale of Sisley's paintings which brought a great deal of money though the late artist could get little enough for his work before! The gentle Sisley exhibited at the first Impressionists exhibition in 1874 and was never disillusioned with the movement. One critic wrote “.. in the small, hard-working and carefree group made up of Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Bazille, in Fontainebleau, he represents cheerfulness, spirit, imagination."

I love this description of this painting by art historian Debra N. Mancoff: “Flood at Port-Marly — with its nuanced, blue-gray palette — serves to illustrate Alfred Sisley's command of the heavy, moisture-laden atmosphere and the clear reflections on the high, trembling waters.”

A print of one of his paintings of a snowy rural path hung by my writing desk for a long time.

Claude's ravishing love Camille

2010-02-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

Again, we have a portrait by Renoir who was their close family friend and often stayed with Claude and Camille in one of their brief periods of prosperity when they lived not in a few dingy rooms but in a proper house in the suburb of Argenteuil only a little outside Paris.

People called her "la volaille Monet" (Monet's bird) or "La Monette." According to a friend, everyone was charmed by her...except of course Claude's father who chose not to meet her as he was against his son's involvement with any woman until Claude's income was steadier. She was a ravishing creature, the friend said, full of kindness and grace. Surely though it was hard for her to never know if she would be have fine wines and lovely dresses one month and be facing water and the pawn shop the next!

I saw her as very complex. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the most complete study of her to date is by Ruth Butler in her book "Hidden in the Shadow of the Master." Another study will be published late summer: "Monet and His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life" by Mary Mathews Gedo. I feel Claude never got over her early loss and, in his own way, searched for her all his life. He kept a portrait of her in his bedroom until he died. We will see what Ms. Gedo says!

two super blogs on Monet/Giverny

2010-01-28T11:13:00.001-08:00

These are two evocative blogs on Monet and his enormous Giverny gardens (in whose original creation he hired many gardeners and conscripted his often grumpy kids and stepkids).

Monet, Giverny, and Normandy
http://www.monet-giverny-normandy.com/

and Giverny News
http://givernews.com/
written poetically by a Giverny Guide. I read this almost every day in my struggling French when writing my novel Claude & Camille: a novel of Claude Monet (Crown, April 6th). Amazon.com link: http://tinyurl.com/ykhkuho

The photograph is of Monet's grave in Giverny which I found while there and stood for some minutes in awe before the mortal remains of the great and generous painter.

Renoir's amiable and plump wife

2010-01-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

According to Renoir's biographer Georges Riviere in the book Renoir et ses amis, the artist at about 40 became immediately infatuated with the 19-year-old seamstress Aline Charigot when they met around 1880. To him, she was perfection and indeed she was very much a "Renoir" in figure, for she became more cheerfully plump as the years progressed, something which endears her to my heart, as I seem to be doing the same! Renoir doubted his gifts and profession in those days (six years after the first Impressionists exhibition the artists were still financially struggling) and she gave him confidence and stability.

Riviere wrote, "There were times when he would put down his palette and gaze at her instead of painting, asking himself why he tried, since what he was trying to achieve was there already." I like that!

I looked on line for a copy of Renoir et ses amis and there seemed to be none for under a few thousand dollars. I will search further; otherwise that purchase will have to wait a little.

Renoir, French operetta, and the diva's bosom

2010-01-16T17:12:00.000-08:00

First I must mention that the impressionists, or many of them, were wild about the theater, ballet and opera -- there being no radio, television, or musical downloads at your desk in those days. Degas had his nearly 1500 pieces of art on ballerinas, Mary Cassatt drew women at the theater, but Renoir was absolutely crazy about theater and music (I had said in a previous post that the composer Gounod had the young Renoir in his choir when the artist was a boy). Renoir used to stop by the house of the great operetta composer Offenbach and they would walk over to the théâtre des Variétés together, where the reigning diva was Hortense Schneider.

Ms. Schneider, as you can see by this portrait, had an ample figure and Renoir was very fond of such womanly attributes. One evening before a performance he was in her dressing room with Manet's brother Edmond and the novelist Zola who both droned on and on about theme in painting. Renoir turned to the diva and said, "That's all well and good, but on to more serious things! How is your bosom these days?" (He liked bosoms even more than music.)

"What a question!" answered the diva with a smile, and she opened her dress and let him see for himself. The novelist turned bright red and fled but Manet's brother, who was also an artist, was delighted. Maybe the novelist was too and ran home to write about it...

I love gentle Renoir and I would have loved to hear Ms. Schneider, who sang the lead in many an operetta in those days in Paris!

Cézanne's banker father and lemonade-loving wife

2010-01-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

“My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade,” Paul Cézanne grumbled before separating from Hortense Fiquet Cézanne; the separation was a pity since their beginnings had been so passionate and clandestine. He was born in 1839 to a wealthy co-founder of a bank, a likely quizzical and stubborn man, whose portrait reading the newspaper painted by his son is one of my favorites. Monsieur Cézanne set Paul to enter the law, but the rebellious boy instead took off to Paris to study art. There, nobody in the art world could comprehend what on earth his painting was about.

At the age of 30 he met the bookseller Hortense and had a devil of a time hiding her from his father, who would of course have stopped his allowance. Poverty and secrecy wore on their relationship, though the young artist finally confessed to his father that he had a wife and son. But when Paul Cézanne’s father died the next year, leaving the artist a wealthy man, Hortense separated from him, leaving Paul to spend the rest of his life painting his beloved Provence mountain and apples and growing into the great artist we know today.

Letter from Pissarro on his eyesight written this day over a century ago

2010-01-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

Camille Pissarro's Letters to his son Lucien are a great treasure. Opening to this date I read:

Paris, January 2, 1891
My dear Lucien,
I have a real problem now; my eye has swollen in this intense cold and threatens to abscess. I shall have to go see Dr. Parenteau, and to stop running around...Durand didn't want my small canvases simply because they were in my last style. He says that an artist should only have one style. [Durand was the art dealer who more than any other discovered impressionism and kept the wolf from the door for Monet and others]

Many of the impressionists suffered problems with their eyes. Pissarro suffered chronic infection of the tear sac in his right eye for the last 15 years of his life and had difficulty painting outside, particularly in winter. His late cityscapes were painted from behind a glass window. We know of course about Monet's terrible cataracts, and I will go into that and how it affected his work in a later blog; also the bad eye problems of Degas and Mary Cassatt.

This photograph is of Pissarro in his older years. I would give a great deal to know him, live in his village and greeting him in passing every morning. I do so love him!

A new year's thought: Monet wanted a few more good years

2009-12-31T08:58:00.001-08:00

In October 1890 Monet wrote a letter to the art critic Gustave Geffroy about the hay stacks series he was painting, saying: "I'm hard at it, working stubbornly on a series of different effects, but at this time of year the sun sets so fast that it's impossible to keep up with it ... the further I get, the more I see that a lot of work has to be done ...I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me because I think I may make some progress in that direction.."

Monet was fifty when he wrote this. He would live 36 years more and leave the earth only months after he had finished his huge garden panels which now hang in the Orangerie in Paris. In 1890, he could not comprehend his future, anymore than we can ours. What miracles may happen this year to any of us?

A New Year's thought for you!

searching for the real Camille

2009-12-27T20:32:00.000-08:00

Who was she really, this woman Claude loved so much and lost so young? Sad how the great loves and models of so many artists have disappeared into the mists of time. She was born in Lyon in 1847, making her just seven years younger than the handsome Claude. And yet still, almost a century and a half after they met in Paris and fell in love, fragments of her life and personality are emerging. In 1947 a maid in the house of a descendant of Claude's best friend Bazille found a box of drawings, prints, and photographs, some sketches by Claude of her. Then some twenty years ago, a journal by an older friend of Monet's was found, describing her charm. And after this what do we have? The many paintings where her artist lover showed her not simply a female shape in the midst of light, but her lovely face. We have few portraits by Monet showing the clear features of his model, but Camille he painted clearly.

How does a novelist take such slender information and form a story? One can tell something of his intense feelings for her in that he truly painted her. She is 19 in this picture. I feel her elusiveness and his intense love.

The writer Ruth Butler also searched for Camille in her nonfiction book Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model Wives of Cézanne, Monet, & Renoir.

Christmas among the impressionists...

2009-12-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

...is a hard subject to research, and I am afraid I have come up with very little but that Edouard Manet once gave Berthe Morisot an easel for Christmas. I would most kindly appreciate any more information from my readers. Though Claude Monet was not religious in any way (but for nature), his second wife Alice was a devout Catholic and surely walked down the cold road a short way from Giverny to the church for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

A happy holiday to the many readers of this blog!

The painting is of course Monet's famous MAGPIE IN THE SNOW.

CLAUDE & CAMILLE's new cover

2009-12-20T16:09:00.001-08:00

It is 3 1/2 exciting months until publication of Claude & Camille: a novel of Claude Monet (Crown) and the newly designed cover uses Claude's haunting portrait of a woman. She seems to blend with the sky, almost becoming the air, not quite obtainable, the ideal feminine. So for those many people who are accustomed to the original cover of a photograph of two young lovers, I can assure you not one word of the passionate story has been changed, but the art on the book jacket has now rightfully been given to the young painter himself.

The original of the 1886 painting can be found in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Degas and his ballet girls

2009-12-20T15:44:00.000-08:00

Degas turned to painting and drawing ballet girls in the 1870s, having obtained a pass to attend rehearsals; it is estimated he portrayed them in sketch or final work at least 1500 times.

The ballet girls were then lowly paid working girls, dancing to bring their families out of poverty, often accepting a wealthy lover to pay the bills. (The young adult novel Marie Dancing by Carolyn Meyer is a wonderful portrayal of Degas and the young girl who modeled for his Little Dancer.) Degas was also fascinated by the angles of the gaslit theater which the Goncourts in their journals described as "tenebrous and glimmering...forms that disappear into shadows in the smoky, dusty silence."

The young girls, pushed by their mothers into the world, were often desperate and hungry, an odd reality which one does not see in their delicate depictions by the intense Degas. And, one might ask, where are the male dancers? Where was the Parisian Nureyev? Ah, but ballet in 19th century Paris was almost entirely feminine! When Coppelia was performed in 1870, even the principal male role was danced by a woman! No lifting the prima ballerina above "his" head, I imagine! But all this is another story, belonging more to the history of the ballet than a blog on the French impressionists.

This painter taught Monet and Renoir?

2009-12-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

This is a typical painting by the Swiss artist Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre. Monet and Renoir found themselves his students in the 1860s for a time and soon left due to (shall we say?) radical differences of style. In my endless paths of research for CLAUDE & CAMILLE, I came across a description of his Paris studio which was typical of the time:

"....a great barn, where the wind came in through every crack, lit by two enormous windows...a model stand, a high stool, two broken chairs, an old armchair, a chest of drawers which held drawings, a table with a basin and some soft soap for washing brushes...two or three easels and portfolios leaning up against the walls and a coal house for storing fuel. Gleyre would not allow anyone to sweep up because dust was bad for paintings, and he used for a long time to sleep in the room on a camp bed and so caught rheumatism."

This is from a fascinating book called Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Century by Jacques Letheve, translated by Paddon.

the first novel about an impressionist was written in 1886

2009-12-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

The writer Émile Zola was good friends with the struggling artists who became the impressionists, but was especially close to Cézanne whom he had known since childhood. However, in 1886 Zola used his intimate knowledge of the art world and studios and fictionalized the life of the sensitive Cézanne and the Bohemian world of the painters in his novel L'oeuvre (The Masterpiece). Some people have suggested that the model for the tormented painter (called Claude!) was really based on Claude Monet, who said he did not recognize himself or any of his colleagues in the book. Others said it was Edouard Manet who served as inspiration. Likely it was a composite portrait of many artists.

The scene in the novel where the artist paints and repaints his canvas until he destroys it entirely is very depressing, but the portrait of the art world of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s is wonderful.

Manet painted this portrait of Zola almost 20 years before the novelist would write L'oeuvre.

who really was Victorine Meurent?

2009-12-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

A few years ago when I was in the Metropolitan Museum gift shop ferreting out research books for my novel CLAUDE & CAMILLE: A NOVEL OF MONET, I found a fascinating, slim paperback about an art historian's search in old Paris archives for clues to the life of Manet's favorite model, Victorine Meurent. Called ALIAS OLYMPIA, the author Eunice Lipton tells of her determined chase to discover what she could of this fascinating model. Part biography, part memoir and some fiction, I found it an unusual and compelling book.

The independent Victorine, who also played guitar and violin, broke off from Manet when she began to take art lessons on her own. One year her work was accepted to the prestigious Salon when Manet's was refused. Only one of her paintings is known to survive. The writer George Moore who met her in Paris when she was older describes her as "a thin woman with red hair, brown small eyes set closely, reminding me of little glasses of cognac... She lit cigarette after cigarette..."

how two Welsh sisters helped save impressionism

2009-12-04T04:10:00.000-08:00

In 1908 in mid-Wales, the sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies began their collection of impressionism at a time when the artists were still greatly ignored by most individuals and institutions. By the time they had finished, they had gathered works by Cézanne, Monet, Bonnard, Manet, Renoir and Van Gogh. Heirs to a great fortune, they slowly grew in their tastes. When they first viewed the artists' work in Paris, they claimed it was "too impressionistic" but Monet's paintings of Venice enchanted them and drew them in.

The collection (which includes Renoir's La Parisienne) is on loan from National Museum Wales to Amerca and will be shown at the following museums:
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (October 9, 2009–January 3, 2010);
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (January 30–April 25, 2010);
Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, New Mexico (May 16–August 8, 2010).

For more information, see:
http://www.afaweb.org/exhibitions/DaviesCollection.htm

The picture of the sisters is from http://www.antiqueandfinearts.com

how Monet almost didn't have his water lily garden

2009-12-04T03:38:00.000-08:00

The truculent French fathers of the tiny town of Giverny exclaimed, "Non, monsieur!" when Claude proposed to install a water trough from the River Ru to the pond in his new land which he had purchased beyond his house and flower garden over rail tracks. It was 1893 and the peculiar artist had been their neighbor now for ten years. Now what did the odd fellow with his strange paintings want? The local people shook their heads, refusing his request. Monsieur wanted to grow peculiar aquatic plants in the pond? It would poison the water! Claude was furious and raged to his wife, "The hell with the natives of Giverny. Throw all the aquatic plants in the river!"

But the country residents of Giverny did not know how stubborn was the will of the 53-year-old painter. He would have this garden! After two months of letters to attorneys and newspapers, his requests were granted and the water lily pond began.

The Monet familly in their garden of Argenteuil

2009-11-16T10:58:00.001-08:00

Claude Monet lived from hand t0 mouth until he was nearly fifty but for a brief period of prosperity in his early thirties, likely engendered by an inheritance from his father. He and his wife Camille and their son Jean moved to a house with a good garden in Argenteuil, just outside Paris. One lovely afternoon he invited his friend Edouard Manet who impulsively painted the happy family, as seen in this lovely painting now in the Metropolitan Museum.

In 1924, Monet recalled: "During the sitting, Renoir arrived. . . . He asked me for palette, brush and canvas, and there he was, painting away alongside Manet. The latter was watching him out of the corner of his eye. . . . Then he made a face, passed discreetly near me, and whispered in my ear about Renoir: 'He has no talent, that boy! Since you are his friend, tell him to give up painting!'"

Renoir and Manet both gave their pictures to Monet.

Some of this information is from the web site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Manet's scandalous nude Olympia

2009-11-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

It is hard to believe what a scandal this painting by Manet in his early years caused when first exhibited. There had been nudes for thousands of years, but this one raised the ire of many, so much that guards had to stand close to prevent angry viewers from thrusting their umbrellas through it. As late as 1932, Paul Valéry said the painting was shocking still, a monster of profane love. As a modern woman, I still can't see anything particularly shocking about it...perhaps someone could comment and enlighten me?

At any rate, the nation of France acquired the painting in 1890 with a public subscription raised by Claude Monet, whom Manet had helped financially - a story I told in a previous post. A great favor returned by the generous Monet who, as soon as he had anything to give and a stable roof over his head, was glad to aid his friends. Years before he was one of the grieving pallbearers at Manet's tragically early death. How these impressionists were all connected!

the impressionists as parents: Berthe Morisot

2009-11-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

Berthe Morisot, who at the age of 33 had married Edouard Manet's brother Eugene, found herself unable to become pregnant for some time. This was difficult in particular for both her sisters were mothers. She wrote to her sister Edma, "I am horribly depressed tonight, tired, on edge, out of sorts, having once more the proof that the joys of motherhood are not for me." At last, at age 37, she bore her daughter Julie. She had hoped for a boy but fell deeply in love with her little girl who was "like a kitten, always happy."

Julie later recalled her "artistic and tender mother." She wrote a diary published about twenty years ago called Growing Up with the Impressionists. How fascinating to have a life where Renoir was always dropping in and asking the pretty Julie to model!

The painting is Julie Manet and Her Greyhound Laertes by her mother Berthe Morisot.

the impressionists as parents: Renoir

2009-11-09T16:02:00.001-08:00

Auguste Renoir was in his fifties and his wife Aline much younger when their son Jean was born.

Jean wrote, "I was a spoilt child. My family enclosed me in a protective wall softly padded on the inside. Beyond this wall, impressive persons came and went. I would have liked to join them and be impressive myself...when I discerned a breach in the wall, I uttered cries of alarm. My father loved to paint my hair...I did not look at my father's pictures, but I was aware of them." Later Jean was sent to boarding school which he hated, and from which he regularly ran away.

The picture is Jean drawing, created by the famous father and the quote is from My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir. Many years later, the little golden-haired Jean would become one of the great French filmmakers.

guess who made this caricature?

2009-11-07T18:31:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, this is an example of the humble beginnings of the old master of Giverny himself before he ever heard of a water lily. The young Claude Monet (called "Oscar" by his family) hated school and by the time he was 17, was known throughout his town of Le Havre for his caricatures which made him a small fortune. Alas, one day he fell in with a local landscape artist called Boudin (more about him later) who challenged him to try landscape painting. Monet was swept away by the experience and soon had spent all his francs on paints and canvases. Everyone had wanted his caricatures and no one wanted his landscapes. At 37 he was a great deal poorer than he had been twenty years before.

Man Standing by a Desk by Claude Oscar Monet

self doubts from Pissarro...

2009-11-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

On a visit to Paris with my friend we went of course to the Père Lachaise Cemetery where unexpectedly I found Pissarro's grave at the end of the row for Jewish graves. The trees seemed heavy and old above this quiet corner. I recalled the words of self-doubt from the great artist: "I have just concluded my series of paintings...sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!"

Pissarro is shown with his wife Julie in Pontoise 1877. She was his mother's maid when he got her pregnant, which must have made for some interesting banging of doors at home. Lack of financial stability wore hard on her as she waited for her gentle husband to make his fortune in art.

the lost impressionist, Frédéric Bazille

2009-11-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

Frédéric is no longer lost to us, for in the past 25 years several art historians have written books about him and a number of museums borrowed his work for special exhibitions. But though it was his idea to gather his struggling artist friends Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and others into a private exhibition, fate intervened and the first exhibition of the impressionists went on without him. He came to Paris from a wealthy family in Montpellier on the promise that he would attend medical school and paint on the side. After months and years of writing his parents that his school exams had once more been inexplicably postponed, he gave himself up to full time painting.

Frédéric was a great friend and when the others had no place to crash, they slept on his floor. "My studio is full of needy painters," he wrote home happily. "Monet is the best of us." The genial, helpful Frédéric is the third major character in my novel CLAUDE AND CAMILLE: A NOVEL OF MONET (Crown, April 2010). His painting shown here - View of the Village of Castelnau-le-Lez - was created when he was 27 years old.

Edouard Manet at sea...

2009-11-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

The painting is Manet's Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne, painted in 1869 when he was 37. If fate had turned another way, the blond dandy would have been on a ship rather than painting one from shore. When Edouard was seventeen, his father (who was not impressed by Edouard's dreams of a life in art) sent the young man on a training vessel to Rio de Janeiro. The navy was not to be his destiny for he twice failed the exam. However, he found the women on land charming (as he subsequently found many women) and some historians feel it was there that the sensual Edouard caught the syphilis which would bring on his early and tragic death.

Mary Cassatt and her sister Lydia

2009-10-30T14:39:00.001-07:00

In 1877, Cassatt's parents and sister Lydia came to live in Paris with Mary who was struggling to gain some place in the art scene. As Mary had decided not to marry (and "dwindle into a wife"), Lydia was her close companion whom she painted several times. But Lydia was ill and after five years in Paris, she died. For a time Mary was too bereaved to work.

There is a lovely, thoughtful novel about the Cassatt sisters called "Lydia Cassatt reading the morning papers" by Harriet Scott Chessman. The portrait shown is Lydia two years before she died as painted by Mary.

the closeness of sisters: Edma and Berthe Morisot

2009-10-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

There were three Morisot sisters, daughters of an upper middle-class family in Paris, but it was the two younger, Edma and Berthe, who grew up as painters together, studying with Corot and copying at the Louvre. When Edma married Adolphe Pontillon and moved to Brittany, the separation was painful. Edma wrote: "I am often with you in my thoughts. I follow you everywhere in your studio and wish that I could escape, if only for a quarter of an hour, to breathe again that air in which we lived." The unmarried Berthe, then 28, replied, "Remember it is sad to be alone." Berthe did not marry until five years later; she had watched household responsibilities seep away the talent from her less-driven sister and vowed it would not happen to her.

Portrait of Edma Morisot by her sister Berthe

A compassionate offer from Manet...

2009-10-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Manet's early painting, Luncheon on the Grass

From a letter 1875 to the art critic Duret:
"I went to see Monet yesterday. I found him in great distress, and at his wits' end. He asked me if I could find someone who would buy at choice ten or twenty of his paintings at 100 francs each. Do you think that we could fix him up between ourselves, each of us contributing 500 francs? Of course it must be understood that nobody, and he least of all, should know that we are arranging it ourselves."

Manet was not always so tactful or friendly to Claude Monet. When Monet had his first small success at the Salon, everyone congratulated Manet for it (confusing their names) which Manet did not like at all. He was a complex man in every way.

I am indebted for this translation once again to the excellent book The Impressionists at First Hand by Denvir. I owned it many years before the thought dawned on me to write about them.

after an impressionistic day picking apples...

2009-10-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

My husband and I went apple picking, rather the last of the crop this late October day, and the light shone down making the grass glisten. The autumn foliage surrounded us and the world smelled of apples. Surely, it was a day and place made for an impressionist! I thought of a BERTHE MORISOT painting of young girls picking fruit, but it turned out they were picking cherries. I found another by her of a girl eating an apple under an apple tree.

The lost years of the Giverny gardens.

2009-10-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

Forty years had passed since Claude Monet’s death when his younger son Michel died in 1966 and during that time little or nothing was done to keep up the gardens. The Academie des Beaux-Arts (the heirs to the property and house) found them in ruins. Rats overran them. The greenhouse panes and the windows in the house were reduced to shards after the bombings of World War II. Floors and ceiling beams had rotted away, a staircase collapsed. Three trees were even growing in the big studio. Almost ten years were necessary to restore the gardens to their former magnificence.

The new custodians expected only a modest number of visitors but, to their surprise, the numbers grew steadily until they now exceed a half million each year. One of the Giverny guides writes a poetic journal in French of life in the gardens today which can be found on line at http://givernews.com/

Renoir, the painter of café walls...

2009-10-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

Most people don't know that for a time before his paintings sold, the young Auguste Renoir made a sort of living painting café walls. The family of one café owner was amazed as they watched him rush up and down a ladder "like a squirrel." The owner was so pleased with the painting of Venus rising from the waves that Renoir's reputation got around and soon he had covered twenty Paris café walls with murals. Alas, not one remains. He was just a thin, eager painter who could paint a lovely girl on a wall in exchange for a glass of wine or a bowl of soup. This story is from the marvelous memoir RENOIR: MY FATHER, by the film director Jean Renoir.

I am just truly discovering Cézanne...

2009-10-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

...or rather I am rediscovering him, for I think with great writers, composers and artists you come to them anew as you grow and change. And in first getting to know the impressionists better, you can find yourself more drawn to one than another, as you find yourself talking more deeply to one person at a dinner party and later realize you missed the quiet man at your side who just sat drinking his soup!

Cézanne was an angry and difficult young man with few social graces and when he was old he was so obsessed with his painting that weather did not deter him and he became ill in a downpour and, disregarding all but his work, died soon after. I will give two quotes of this urgent, beloved visionary: "A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art," and "We live in a rainbow of chaos." Much more to come!

Susan Vreeland's novel about Renoir

2009-10-16T14:22:00.001-07:00

I think nothing can bring the everyday lives of the French impressionists to us more vividly than fine, sensitive historical fiction. In Luncheon of the Boating Party, Susan Vreeland tells the fascinating story of the painter Renoir and his many friends, all who modeled, or loaned money, or sewed dresses, or gave encouragement, or provided a small dog, or struggled with love, as he painted his famous picture. How many people contribute each in their own way to create a work of art! Often their voices or the colors of their individual lives are lost to time. Susan Vreeland has heard and captured those voices and created as well a picture of this most modest painter Renoir who said he wanted to put beauty in the world not ugliness, and who, in his final days on earth, exclaimed that at last he understood how to paint a flower.

Monet seeking the impossible

2009-10-15T16:38:00.000-07:00

"I am chasing a dream. I want the unattainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat; and that's the end. They're finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible. If only I could satisfy myself with what is possible!"

from Denvir: "The Impressionists at First Hand"

the blunt and gifted Mary Cassatt

2009-10-13T07:09:00.001-07:00

Mary Cassatt’s parents objected to her becoming a professional artist, but even so this American painter moved to Paris to study in 1866 (the year Claude Monet met his love Camille) with her mother of course as chaperone. Women could not attend the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts at that time, so she studied privately. After some years, Mary returned to America and but later she was able to settle in France once more with her family, including her beloved sister who was in poor health. A blunt woman, Cassatt was welcomed by the newly banded impressionists whom one critic thought were such bad painters that they were “afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye.” Cassatt did not think so. She wrote, “We are carrying on a despairing fight and need all our forces.” Encountering Degas, she knew she had found her light.

More to come about this remarkable artist in further posts!

studio in the rue de la Condamine

2009-10-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

One afternoon when many of his artist friends were visiting, the congenial painter Frédéric Bazille took up his brush and made a fast portrait of all of them. Experts differ on the identity of some of them, but Edouard Manet is before the easel and the men on and below the open stair may be Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. When the painting was nearly done, impetuous Manet snatched the brush and pushed Bazille into place to paint him into his own picture...a bit too tall. Bazille's good friend Edmond plays the corner spinet to entertain them all. It would not be until four years later that the painters would have their first independent exhibition and be called impressionists.

Thoughts from Degas at age 39

2009-10-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

from a letter written on his trip to New Orleans
"How much I want to tell you about my art! If I could have another twenty years' time to work, I could produce things that would endure. Am I to end up like that [paintings he did not like], after racking my brains like somebody possessed, and after having experienced so many ways of seeing and doing?" Degas had begun his ballet paintings five years before the writing of this letter.

This quote is from the marvelous book "The Impressionists at First Hand" by Bernard Denvir.Some people do not consider Degas really an impressionist.

lovely and gifted Berthe Morisot

2009-10-12T06:29:00.001-07:00

Here is a portrait of the lovely young artist as seen by her colleague Edouard Manet (who was rather in love with her). Born into a good Parisian family in 1841, she and her sister Edma showed a much stronger gift for painting than the usual well-bred girls of their age who would make pretty watercolors and tuck them in an album to show visitors. Art was her joy and torment, for she never felt she was good enough though her work was warmly welcomed by her fellows Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and others for display in the first impressionists' exhibition. The critics and some of the public, however, were scandalized by the exhibition's paintings which they called merely sketches; one man even shouted that modest Berthe was a whore. Pissarro promptly punched him in the face.

Much more to come on her exquisite work!

new van Gogh novel SUNFLOWERS

2009-10-10T18:23:00.001-07:00

October 13th 2009 sees the publication of a new van Gogh novel by Sheramy Bundrick. Publishers' Weekly wrote: "A knockout debut novel...an impressive volume of suspense, delight, and heartbreak" and novelist Susan Vreeland praised it as "Lays bare in rich, compelling scenes the mystery of the turbulent and misunderstood final two years in van Gogh’s life." A wonderful portrait of van Gogh!

Claude's love for Camille

2009-10-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

Camille was eighteen when she met him and only thirty-two when she died; she left her good home to live with him and her parents disowned her. She was charming and a clever amateur actress and I think that their good friend, the struggling painter Renoir, had a particular tenderness for her for he painted her often and she almost always smiled for him with a special sweetness.(Who could not like Renoir?) Claude adored her and was devastated when she died. Here he painted her with a dog. What did he say to her as he painted? "Stay still just twenty minutes more, then we'll go out someplace cheap for dinner and wine and then, dearest, when we come home...." We try to hear the murmurs of the young lovers in a hidden room in Paris in 1866.

gentle Pissarro

2009-10-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

This painting is "The Stage Coach at Louveciennes - 1870"

I have a great love for Camille Pissarro whose paintings of rural French life make me deeply happy; if possible, I would walk inside one. He was born in 1830 and died in 1903. I find his use of color particularly beautiful. He did not have Claude Monet's gift for putting himself forward nor Renoir's for portraiture, and so he remained fairly poor all his life. His paintings are worth millions now but towards the end of his life he sometimes did not have the train fare to go to Paris to try to sell his work. His collected "Letters to His Son Lucien" are remarkable and his portraits of his several children very tender. When he began to paint, the great Corot stood up for him; in later years he mentored Cézanne and Gauguin. Cézanne said, "Pissarro was a father to me...something like the good Lord.”

Did the impressionists make good husbands?

2009-10-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

Many people think of artists as promiscuous and it is true a few of the impressionists had a roving eye. When Manet's wife caught him following another woman, he excused himself, saying,"But I thought it was you, dear!" However, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir were very devoted to their wives and depended on them very much. Monet never painted anyone as much as he did his first wife Camille; Renoir married a seamstress in his 40s and adored her, and Pissarro married his mother's maid Julie. As for the famous women artists, Cassatt did not marry and Morisot married Manet's brother Eugene....a real story there! The painting shown is of Sisley and his wife by their good friend Renoir.

The first oil paint tubes made impressionism

2009-10-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

In 1841, when the very young Claude Monet had just celebrated his first birthday, the American artist John Rand patented the first collapsible metal tube for artist’s oil paint. Before that happy invention, artists had to grind their colors and mix them with oil and thinner and, if an artist wanted to work outdoors, he had to carefully pack his prepared paint in breakable glass vials or leaky animal bladders. By the time Claude was seventeen and beginning to paint, he was likely spending a lot of his money on those tubes. His good friend Renoir declared years later, “Without paint in tubes, there would be no impressionism.”

Monet's bad design for wallpaper....

2009-09-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

The first exhibition of the impressionists met with much negative criticism when it opened in 1874. Art critic Louis Leroy called his review "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", thus giving them their name. Of the famous Impression: Sunrise, Leroy wrote that "wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape."

Oddly today on the web one can find Monet's great painting as....wallpaper! But the price is slightly lower than the original hanging in the Musée Marmotton, Paris. I wonder if Leroy would still claim his opinion was right? We must be grateful to the silly man for naming this beloved school of painting, anyway!

when Auguste Renoir was young...

2009-09-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Auguste Renoir was a tailor's son and, as a boy, slept on his father's workbench -- the low wood platform on which the father sat crosslegged each day and sewed. Unfortunately for Auguste, his father often left stray pins there...ouch! For a while as a teenager he had work hand-painting pieces of china, but one day a visiting artist informed the family that Auguste must become a real painter. The family burst into tears, knowing that would condemn their son to poverty. On the other hand, as a boy he had a beautiful singing voice and his choirmaster, the composer Gounod ("Faust" etc.), hoped Auguste would become an operatic tenor. Ah, the turns of fate! We might today hear stories of the legendary tenor Renoir as Faust instead of the sweet, gifted painter he became! Did he sing when he painted?

my novel CLAUDE AND CAMILLE and the real Camille

2009-09-25T16:39:00.001-07:00

I do not know the names of these two lovely young models but they capture how much in love the 25-year-old Claude was with his 18-year-old, upper-class model Camille who threw away her secure life to be with him.

I shall be posting as much as I can about the real Camille in the weeks to come. Sadly, all letters to and from her have been lost. No one back in the mid 1860s knew that he would be more than a haughty artist or she more than just another lovely girl come to Paris to find a life.

Claude Monet's starving artist years

2009-09-25T15:03:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows the picture of the old white-bearded man, well fed, showing visitors his Japanese bridge and water lilies, his vast studio and his plentiful table. But the young Claude personifies the starving artist. For months at a time, he and his good friend Renoir lived on a large sack of beans and made quick chalk sketches of the neighbors to pay the rent. More than once the young Claude was physically thrown out of his cheap rooms, once slashing his canvases before he ran out the door (to think of it!) and another time tossed out stark naked in the middle of the night. It was a long road to Giverny!

Here's our Claude age 25 -- wondering if anyone would ever want his work or if he could afford a flower pot, much less a garden!