4.9/5
Put a small, hazy harbor scene in front of a hostile Paris critic in 1874, and you get the name of a movement. Claude Monet is called the father of Impressionism because the style is named after his canvas Impression, Sunrise, and because nobody in the group painted outdoor light, in quick separate strokes of color, as steadily or as long as he did. The eight paintings below show how that happened, one date and one museum at a time.
Eight canvases, 1866–1919
| # | Painting | Year | Where it hangs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Women in the Garden | 1866–1867 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 2 | Garden at Sainte-Adresse | 1867 | The Met, New York |
| 3 | La Grenouillère | 1869 | The Met, New York |
| 4 | Impression, Sunrise | 1872 | Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris |
| 5 | La Gare Saint-Lazare | 1877 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 6 | The Garden at Vétheuil | 1881 | National Gallery of Art, Washington |
| 7 | Haystacks | 1890–1891 | Art Institute of Chicago and others |
| 8 | Water Lilies | 1919 | The Met, New York |
Read them in order and you watch a style being invented, named, stretched and finally dissolved into water. Five of the eight are also among the Monet canvases painted by hand for people who want one on their own wall.
1. Women in the Garden (1866–1867): the big canvas goes outdoors
The first picture is enormous: 255 by 205 cm, about 100 by 81 inches, and it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. Monet began it in 1866, at 26, with his companion Camille Doncieux posing for the figures. To paint a canvas that size in the open air, he dug a trench and lowered it, so he could reach the upper half without changing his point of view.
The Salon rejected it in 1867. One juror grumbled that too many young people were set on this abominable direction and that art needed protecting from them. His friend Frédéric Bazille bought the painting when Monet had no money. That abominable direction, real daylight painted outside at full scale, is the one Monet kept for the next 60 years.
2. Garden at Sainte-Adresse (1867): bright color in flat bands
Monet spent the summer of 1867 at Sainte-Adresse, a resort on the English Channel near Le Havre, and painted a terrace there with Honfleur on the horizon. The Met bought the terrace picture with its two flags in 1967.
Look at how it's built: three horizontal bands stacked almost flat, with smooth passages running straight into spots of pure color. Monet nicknamed it his Chinese painting with flags, and the Hokusai print that may have inspired it is still at his house in Giverny. It went on show at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in April 1879, as no. 157.
3. La Grenouillère (1869): the quick stroke, found beside Renoir
At a floating restaurant and boat-hire on the Seine near Bougival, Monet and Renoir set up side by side in 1869 and painted the same view. Monet's version is at the Met; Renoir's is in Stockholm.
Monet thought little of his. In a September 1869 letter to Bazille he called his canvases of the spot bad sketches and the real picture only a dream. The Met's canvas is probably one of those sketches: ripples, leaves, boats and bathers set down in broad, fast strokes you can count. That loose, visible brushwork is what the word Impressionism came to mean, five years before the word existed.
4. Impression, Sunrise (1872): the canvas that named a movement
The hazy view of Le Havre harbor is small, 48 by 63 cm, one of six canvases of the port Monet painted in 1872. The moment has even been worked out from the sun, the tides, the weather and the smoke: November 13, 1872, at about 7:35 a.m. It hangs in the Paris museum with more Monets than any other, and for most people it's his most famous single picture.
In April 1874 it hung in the first show of an independent artists' society, at 35 boulevard des Capucines, the photographer Nadar's studio. The catalogue needed a title, and Monet's answer was a shrug: “They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn't really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: ‘Put Impression.’”
On April 25, 1874, the critic Louis Leroy mocked the show in Le Charivari under the headline “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” His imaginary old-school painter stops at this canvas and sneers: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” The insult stuck. The public picked up the label, and so did the painters.
That's the plainest reason Monet counts as the father of Impressionism: the word came off his canvas.
5. La Gare Saint-Lazare (1877): Paris steam, painted as a set
Monet rented a studio near Gare Saint-Lazare and got the railway's permission to paint on the concourse and beside the tracks. Starting in early January 1877, he finished twelve paintings of the station in roughly four months; the version in the Musée d'Orsay measures 75 by 105 cm.
Seven went into the third Impressionist exhibition on April 5, 1877. It was his first series on a single theme, and critics liked how exactly he caught trains arriving and leaving. Painting one place again and again as the light changed is the habit that becomes the Haystacks thirteen years later.
6. The Garden at Vétheuil (1881): full sun after the worst years
In the autumn of 1878 Monet moved his family to Vétheuil, a Seine village northwest of Paris, sharing a house with the family of his patron Ernest Hoschedé. Camille died the next year, and money was so short he once left the house to dodge creditors.
This is where the father of Impressionism wobbled. In 1880 he sent two paintings to the official Salon (one was accepted), and his river pictures of the time turn darker. His last show with the Impressionists came in 1882.
Then, in 1881, he painted his own garden in full summer. His sunflower path at Vétheuil has tall flowers crowding a sloping walk, and the small figures on it are his son Michel and Jean-Pierre Hoschedé. The Washington version, at the National Gallery of Art, measures 151.5 by 121 cm; another is at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Every sunflower is built from separate touches of color.
7. Haystacks (1890–1891): one motif, every kind of light
Near the end of summer 1890, at Giverny, his home since 1883, Monet began painting the stacks of harvested grain in the fields and kept at it through the following spring: 25 canvases in the main series. The Art Institute of Chicago owns six.
As the light changed, he switched from canvas to canvas, sometimes with as many as eight on the go, usually spending about an hour on each. The stacks never move. The hour and the weather do, and that change is the real subject.
In May 1891 the dealer Durand-Ruel showed fifteen, and most sold within a month for as much as 1,000 francs. With the money Monet bought his Giverny house and grounds outright and started the water-lily pond. Years later Kandinsky credited the series with showing him the unsuspected power of the palette.
How much is a real Monet painting worth?
Major Monets fetch tens of millions of dollars, and one has passed $100 million: the 1890 stacks pictured above sold at Sotheby's New York on May 14, 2019, for $110.7 million, the first Impressionist work to top that mark. The best price for a water-lily canvas is $84.7 million, paid at Christie's New York in 2018 for Nymphéas en fleur (1914–1917).
8. Water Lilies (1919): the pond with no horizon
The wide 1919 pond at the Met measures 101 by 200 cm (39 3/4 by 78 3/4 inches). There's no shore and no horizon, only water, with pads and pink blossoms floating on a pale reflection of the sky. Many of his roughly 250 water-lily paintings were made while his eyesight was failing.
The day after the Armistice of November 1918, Monet offered the French state two decorative panels as a gift for peace. The offer grew into two oval rooms built to hold them: eight compositions running nearly 100 meters, installed in 1927, months after his death. He wanted the walls to feel like a wave with no horizon and no shore.
Few visitors came at first. In the 1950s painters and collectors took a second look at the late Monet, and his Giverny pictures now read as a bridge from Impressionism to abstract art.
Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro: who is the real father of Impressionism?
Pissarro has a real claim. He was the oldest of the group, historians have called him its dean, and he's the only artist who showed at all eight Impressionist exhibitions, 1874–1886. Cézanne put it simply: “he was a father for me.”
Monet's claim is of another kind. The name comes from his canvas, and he was a leading figure in forming the society behind the 1874 show. He also painted this way longer and more steadily than anyone in the group, until his death in 1926. His first outdoor teacher, Eugène Boudin, took him painting en plein air around 1858, and Monet regarded Boudin as the master he owed everything to.
The fair split: Pissarro was the group's father figure. Monet is the father of the painting itself. He also came well before the next wave. Born in 1840, he was more than 12 years older than Van Gogh and outlived him by more than 36. For the other pictures that shaped how we look at art, see the paintings everyone should know by sight.
Monet at home, in real paint
The originals stay in their museums, but these pictures are meant to be seen up close, stroke by stroke. A hand-painted copy puts that broken brushwork on your wall in real oil, not ink. Every Monet the studio paints to order is in one place, from the Le Havre sunrise to the late ponds.
Sources
- Musée Marmottan Monet, home page
- Musée de l'Orangerie, The Water Lilies by Claude Monet
- Musée de l'Orangerie, History of the Water Lilies cycle
- Museum Barberini, Claude Monet, Grainstacks (1890)
- The Met, collection record: Water Lilies, 1919
- The Met, collection record: Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867
- The Met, collection record: La Grenouillère, 1869
