My intense love for Monet's best friend Frédéric

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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.