The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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118 CHAPTER 31 The Move Toward Modernism

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Monet was by no means the first painter to deviate from

academic techniques. Constable had applied color

in rough dots and dabs, Delacroix had occasionally

juxtaposed complementary colors to increase brilliance,

and Manet had often omitted halftones. But Monet went

further by interpreting form as color itself—color so rapid-

ly applied as to convey the immediacy of a sketch.

Consequently, Impression: Sunrisestruck the art world as a

radically new approach. One critic dismissed the painting

as “only an impression,” no better than “wallpaper in its

embryonic state,” thus unwittingly giving the name

“impressionism” to the movement that would dominate

French art of the 1870s and 1880s.

Monet’s early subjects include street scenes, picnics,

café life, and boating parties at the fashionable tourist

resorts that dotted the banks of the River Seine near Paris.

However, as Monet found the intangible and shifting play

of light more compelling than the pastimes of Parisian

society, his paintings became more impersonal and

abstract. Wishing to fix sensation, or as he put it, to “seize

the intangible,” he painted the changing effects of light on

such mundane objects as poplar trees and haystacks. Often

working on a number of canvases at once, he might gener-

ate a series that showed his subject in morning light, under

the noon sun, and at sunset. After visiting London in the

1890s, during which time he studied the works of

Constable and Turner, his canvases became even more

formless and radiant. At his private estate in Giverny, he

lovingly painted dozens of views of the lily ponds, and the

lavish gardens that he himself designed and cultivated

(Figure 31.5). These ravishing paintings brought him

pleasure and fame at the end of his long career.

Monet may be considered an ultrarealist in his effort to

reproduce with absolute fidelity the ever-changing effects

Figure 31.5 CLAUDE MONET, Water-Lily Pond, Symphony in Green(Japanese Bridge), 1899. Oil on canvas, 35 in.  3 ft.^3 ⁄ 5 in.

The reflections of dense foliage in the surface of the waterlily pond eliminate distinctions between foreground and background and

suggest a shifting play of light. Such paintings inspired the Symbolist Charles Morice to call Monet “master and king of the ephemeral.”