58 Artists Magazine October 2019
paint, the movement of the brush
re-creating the motion and blur of the
figures. People, trees, buildings and
sky all seem part of the same flux.
While this seems beguiling to the
modern eye, contemporary critics
found it a somewhat cold approach.
“No inner feeling,” wrote Charles
Bigot in 1887, “no subtlety of impres-
sion, no personal vision, no choice of
subjects to show you something of
the man and something of the artist.
Behind this eye and hand, one looks
in vain for a mind and soul.”
The viewing public was used to
the idea of expression coming from
drawing and figures. The idea that
color and light alone could be expres-
sive was something they had yet to
entertain. In effect, Monet was trans-
ferring the focus of expression from
a depiction of the world to the action
of his own sensibility as he worked
to perceive and order the color in
his painting. The resulting luxurious
warmth and sensual delight of his
vision is expressive in the truest
sense—something that it took con-
temporary critics time to understand.THE MOVE TO GIVERNY
Monet’s fortunes fluctuated in the
1870s. Among his new collectors was
Ernest Hoschedé, a department store
owner and part-time art critic.
Hoschedé commissioned paintings
and Monet stayed with him at his
country house, where he formed a
deep friendship with Hoschedé’s wife,
Alice. Hoschedé eventually went
bankrupt, and the two families moved
in together in 1877 to a small house
in Vétheuil, farther along the river.
Business was bad, and Monet was
flat broke. Worse, his wife, Camille,
was very ill following the birth of
their second child. Alice nursed
Camille until her death in 1878.
Following a period of mourning,
Monet and Alice set up house
together. Her husband had more or
less left the scene, but now Monet
was responsible for her six children
and his own two sons. The couple
moved farther out of Paris, in part to
avoid the scandal of living out of wed-
lock. They found an old farmhouse at
Giverny, where Monet would remainfor the rest of his long life. Later,
when things improved, he was able to
purchase the place. When Hoschedé
died in 1891, Monet married Alice
and legitimized their life together.THE PURSUIT
OF NEW MOTIFS
The Denver exhibition is particularly
strong in works from the 1880s, a
period in which Monet made many
extensive painting trips, all while
wrestling with adverse weather, poor
lodgings and lack of funds in a relent-
less pursuit of new motifs. His travels
extended from the chilly Normandy
coast to the glorious warmth of the
Mediterranean to the foggy banks of
the Thames.
Often away for months at a time,
he wrote to Alice almost every day.
Many letters were anguished com-
plaints about the weather and thedifficulties of painting. “... I’m back
from work, a bad session, and I wiped
out everything I did this morning,”
he wrote from Fresselines, in central
France, in 1889. “It wasn’t well real-
ized or understood. It’s always like
this to start with. I worked better
yesterday. On top of this, the
weather’s very changeable today—
gray skies and sunshine.”
The range of light effects Monet
encountered on his travels was exten-
sive. Fishing Boats (page 57), painted
in 1883, finds him tackling the gray
light of the northern coast, figuring
out how to break the close color to
keep it active. The sea is an essay in
subtle turquoises, gray-violets and
aqua-greens while the stony beach is
alive with blues and violets. The hues
of the gaily painted boats are effec-
tively restraining, in keeping with the
coolness of the light.