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 photograph of Claude Monet at just 20...

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.

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

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!

how Monet almost didn't have his water lily garden

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

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.

the lost impressionist, Frédéric Bazille

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.

A compassionate offer from Manet...

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.

the blunt and gifted Mary Cassatt

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!

lovely and gifted Berthe Morisot

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!

Claude's love for Camille

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.

Did the impressionists make good husbands?

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

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....

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!