Claude Monet's Painting, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond 1920

Outline

Introduction

Monet's Work

Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond 1920

Style of Monet

Artistic Elements of Works

Labels

Conclusion

Introduction

When French impressionist printers are talked about, Monet is always on the top of the list. Growing up in France put him in contact with many artists. Several of these artists helped influence his many paintings. His art style called impressionism became very will known and his paintings today are worth millions of dollars and are found throughout museums around the world. Claude Monet was born November 14, 1840 in Paris, France. He grew up in LeHavre(Orr 119-210), France as the son of a grocer. As a child, he was free to roam the Norman coast and the Seine estuary. It was here that he learned to love the power and constant movement of the sea. These experiences would greatly influence his works of painting as he got older. Monet devoted his life to an art style that he developed called Impressionism. He brought the study of transcient effects of natural light to its most refined expression. As his style developed Monet violated artistic convention in interest of direct artistic expression(Patin 45-49). His experiments in rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct sketch like application of bright color became more and more daring and he seemed to cut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional painter supported by the art establishment. The press labeled this type of work impressionist because it seemed sketchy and unfinished, like a first impression and because one of Monet's paintings had borne the title, Impression: Sunrise.

Monet's Work

Monet's development can be summarized in a handful of pictures that must stand for many hundreds. He was an insatiable worker. Red Boats at Argenteuil painted in 1875, is a fully developed impressionist landscape of the period of the first group exhibition. The stretch of water is shot through with strokes of blue in many different shades. The reflections of boats and shore are struck into it freely, in bright tints of greens and pinks. On its sunny side, the largest of the boats is yellow in the highest lights, shot with lavender near the water, yet a bright rosy color overall(Taylor 98-101).

From a little distance these different tints and colors within single areas tend to disappear as individual strokes. The eye "mixes" them and in doing so creates colors with more vibration, more sparkle, than would have been possible if the various reds or greens or blues or pinks had been mixed on the palette and applied in large areas in the conventional way or pulled together by "blending" on the canvas. in this stage of impressionism form has not disappeared, although light, shattering against it, is already permeating and softening its surface, obscuring its details(Levine 221-228).

Monet's preoccupation with reducing all visual experience to terms of pure light became an obsession. When his young wife died he was horrified to find himself analyzing the nacreous tints of her skin in ...