The sovereignty of light: Claude Monet

I

Biographers praise, attack or quietly obliterate previous lives.  Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision (Allen Lane, 545 pages, £35) chose the latter, but it is certainly not, as it falsely claims and many reviewers have blindly repeated, “the first biography of Monet in English”.  In fact, Charles Mount published Monet with Simon & Schuster in 1966.  It’s doubtful that Daniel Wildenstein’s Catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1974-9; five volumes, 1,540 pages, 2,580 works) includes—as this book also claims to use in another self-puff—“three thousand letters by Monet.”

This biography has 50 handsome color plates (though many of them immediately fell out of the loose binding) and 85 useful textual illustrations.  Wullschläger, a stylish writer and the usually sharp-eyed art critic of the Financial Times, is livelier than the academic art historians.  She describes Monet’s beautiful subjects and techniques, but since they have few human figures, thin cultural background and intellectual content, they resist analysis and  interpretation. His repetitive series of haystacks, poplars, cathedrals and water lilies become rather dull, and her detailed discussion of a great many tedious pictures blurs the focus and clogs the narrative.

She has also misread many of these works.  Monet in African uniform is wearing a képi (not a fez); his wife’s Green Dress is stunning (not absurdly opulent); the viewer cannot tell, in his portrait of Germaine, if she “gazes at Monet with curiosity and confidence”; the maid in The Luncheon is opening the cupboard (not “half-crushed into it”); the tranquil and soothing Water Lilies do not express the “chaos and dissolution” of wartime France — they are a monument to peace created in wartime France; Manet’s Olympia is vivid and sexy (not sickly); Seurat’s Grande Jatte portrays a promenade (not a picnic).

Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863)

Claude Monet (1840-1926), born in Paris but taken to Le Havre at the age of five, was as Norman as calvados and camembert.  Unlike the wealthy, upper-class, sophisticated Parisians Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, he had no interest in literature, theatre or music.  He did not have a complex character nor a fascinating life, and gradually withdrew from the world.  Short, stocky and robust, he had a gargantuan appetite and a huge belly to match.  The skinny Renoir, his greatest artist-friend, exclaimed, “It’s a real joy just to think about eating a cutlet with you.  I’m drooling in advance.”

Monet—who lived through coups and revolutions, an empire, two republics, a civil war and World War I—saw military service in Algeria.  In North Africa, he nostalgically recalled, “nothing attracted me so much as the endless cavalcades under the burning sun, the dramatic raids, the crackle of gunpowder, the sabre thrusts, the nights in a desert under a tent. . . . In Algeria I spent two really charming years.  I incessantly saw something new.”  He asserted, “Algeria did me the greatest good, morally and from all points of view,” but he also insisted it was a torment “that left me with so many awful memories”.  After returning from the powerful sun of North Africa, Monet abandoned the sombre colours of traditional landscapes, attempted to see his subjects in a new light and felt “as if he had been born blind and had suddenly been granted his sight”.  In seeking to capture his vision of reality, he explored more countries than any of the Impressionists and traveled from Algeria to Norway, Italy to England, Spain to Holland.

His greatest fault was self-pity.  During his early years of poverty, he wrote many shameless and humiliating letters begging for and even demanding funds: “I need a bit of money, you must make every effort to find some. . . . Please think about me, I beg you.  I absolutely need that money. . . . Oh, I really blame you, I never thought you’d abandon me like this. . . . I’m telling you, we are starving.  May you never know such moments of misery.”  After stretching friendships to the limit, he ran up bills and owed back rent, then hopped it from hotels and houses.

Wullschläger is good on Monet’s money.  Like Rilke and Joyce, he assumed that “his welfare must be, deserves to be, the immediate concern of others. . . . He believed his art conferred a right to good living, and he enjoyed fine things”—including pleated shirts trimmed with lace cuffs and a gold-headed cane.  But as Samuel Johnson observed, “Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed.”  A titanic worker, Monet earned 12,000 francs in 1872; 100,000 in 1891; 227,000 in 1899; 271,000 in 1904.  In the 1920s a single picture sold for 50,000, and he earned 40,000 annual interest on savings of one million francs.  His biographer writes, “the near-destitute widower of 1879 had fought indefatigably, cannily, and had won all the prizes: [his second wife] Alice, the security of his family, his house at Giverny, his expanding garden, a position as the leading painter of his day.”  Even when he had everything: health, success, a luxurious estate and devoted women, he still declared, “I am very unhappy,” which contradicted the joie de vivre of his work.

Monet’s life changed decisively with three different women.  In 1879 the death of his first wife, Camille, freed him for romance with Alice; after her death in 1911 her daughter, Blanche, took her place in his life.  Two uncharacteristically claustrophobic, anguished paintings of the 1870s, a striking contrast to his oxygenated plein air work, suggest the storm and stress of his marriage to Camille.  Wullschläger, like many critics, misinterprets one of his most revealing works, Red Cape, Portrait of Madame Monet (1873), and writes that Camille “passes outside the French windows of the house: a fleeting figure, a face, sketched in rough daubs, with an expression between poignancy and blankness.”   But in this painting Camille, framed by the wispy curtains and stark windows of a barren interior, stands outdoors, isolated and frozen (not fleeting) in the snow.  Protectively clutching the blood-red cape that covers her fur-trimmed dark jacket and skirt, she stops and looks wistfully into the house that cruelly and dramatically excludes her.

The Red Kerchief, by Claude Monet, 1873

After Camille’s death, Monet felt guilt as well as grief.  She had suffered great hardships while he sacrificed their life for his art, and he’d begun his affair with Alice when Camille lay dying.  In Camille Monet on Her Death-Bed (1879), he portrayed her as morbidly brown-skinned, with closed eyes and open mouth, head slightly raised on a mound of pillows and a bunch of roses on her chest.  She’s covered by a black shawl and her face is enclosed from crown to chin by a nun-like wimple.  The high pillows and bedcovers are painted with frantic slashes and swirls of funereal bluish-grey, streaked with black and yellow and set against a sombre background.  His emotional portrait (unusual in Monet) is both a valediction and severance from the woman he’d once loved.  Despite Wullschläger’s statement, Camille’s corpse has no “verge of a smile”. In a strikingly ghoulish precedent, the 18th-century Scottish artist Allan Ramsay admitted that when his infant son died, he instinctively recorded how he looked on his deathbed, became absorbed in the task and forgot he was painting his own dead child: “While thoroughly occupied thus, I felt no more concern than if the subject had been an indifferent one.”

Camille Monet sur son lit de mort by Claude Monet (1879)

The impressive heroine of this biography is Alice Hoschedé, the wife of Ernest, a wealthy department-store owner and avid collector of Monet’s art.  He went bankrupt and in 1878, after pooling their common resources, moved with his wife and six children into Monet’s modest house on the Seine.  He then was mostly absent in Paris while trying in vain to recover his fortune.  “Sympathetic, lively, competent and reassuring,” Alice cared for the mortally ill Camille and Monet’s two young sons, as well as her own children.

This upper-class woman, accustomed to luxury and reduced to degrading poverty, took up dressmaking, gave piano lessons and drudged in the kitchen.  Deeply humiliated by the descent from the glories of her château and by the financial disasters of her husband, Alice sought emotional and physical comfort with Monet, and they married after Ernest’s death in 1892. Though Monet craved solitude for his work, she stayed close to him—even in a rocking Venetian gondola—while he painted.  Alice could be witty and remarked, after dining on Aline Renoir’s excellent bouillabaisse, “No, I don’t loathe Mme. R. as much as you think.”  In Venice, as a guest in the magical Palazzo Barbaro, she recalled that “your wishes were realised as you were forming them.”  As she lay dying in 1911, her main concern was to spare Monet the pain of her death.

During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Monet fled to London, where Camille (not Claude) Pissarro became his closest friend in exile.  They “shared political and artistic sympathies, homesickness, books [which?] and visits to the National Gallery”.  His second journey in 1901 was more fruitful.  He watched Queen Victoria’s funeral with Henry James, who spoke perfect French and was charming; rediscovered the Turners while minimising their influence on his own work; and destabilised the steel bridges over the Thames into “weightless phantoms.”  In The Decay of Lying (1902), Oscar Wilde paradoxically observed that Nature imitates Art: “Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? . . . The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.”

Degas and Mary Cassatt had gone blind, and Monet too began to lose his sight around 1920.  Two years later he lamented, “I am almost blind and should give up all work.”  But three cataract operations, strong spectacles and eye drops improved his vision, and he bravely soldiered on toward the blurred series of Water Lilies.  He “asked only to live to be one hundred”, but managed 86: the last survivor—Degas died in 1917, Renoir in 1919—of the comrades who had struggled for recognition in the early days of Impressionism.

II

Ingres had insisted “however skillful it is, the touche must not be visible, it hinders the illusion.”  By contrast, the Impressionists dissolved outlines, displayed their  brushstrokes and lacked finish.  They emphasised the fleeting moments and transient effects of nature, the reflections of light on water, the change of color and atmosphere.  When working on his series of haystacks and poplars, Monet sometimes painted only a few strokes on the canvas before the light transformed the scene, then rushed to the next picture, already begun, to capture the dancing instant of illumination.  His art opposed the invasive industrialized and mechanized urban life with scenes of calm and leisure, hedonism and endless pleasure.

Monet’s art is limited by the absence of people.  His figures are usually distant, with vague features, or entirely missing from the empty landscape.  Camille’s rare detailed face, in the absurd costume and tilted pose of La Japonaise, is simpering and sentimental.  The dance of the fans on the back wall is more interesting than Camille.  As Wullschläger notes a serious defect: “whoever he depicted was playing a part in a composition, not a psychologically considered or independent person.”  A comparison of Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets and Monet’s Camille with a Bouquet of Violets shows Manet’s clear superiority in depicting humanity.

Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets by Edouard Manet (1872)

Portrait de Camille au bouquet de violettes by Claude Monet (1877)

Monet had an iron physique, worked demonically hard (sometimes from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., stopping only when overcome by darkness), and was willing to endure severe climates and extreme hardships in order to capture the violence of storms at sea.  He followed the stoical example of the Renaissance sculptor Luca della Robbia, who (Giorgio Vasari records) when sketching at night in the cold would warm his feet by placing them in a basket of wood shavings.  During the harsh Norman winters, his face half-frozen, Monet stood next to a portable heater, wore three overcoats and managed to hold his brush with gloved hands.  As the critic John House wrote of his perilous struggles with nature, “while painting the Manneporte at Etretat, he was swamped by a vast wave, when he had mistimed a session of painting on the beach after misreading the tide tables; in the gales at Belle-Ile, his easel had to be tied to the rocks; in snow and ice his beard grew icicles, and he had himself fastened to the ice [like Ulysses lashed to the mast], with a hot-water bottle to keep his hands warm enough for him to paint.”

He also made godlike efforts to create, control and maintain his subjects.  Renoir recalled that Monet was given special permission to paint the Gare du Nord: “the trains were halted; the platforms were cleared; the engines were crammed with coal so as to give out all the smoke Monet desired.”  In a fascinating recurrent pattern, he paved the public road near his garden so that dust from the traffic would not settle on his flowers.  When an oak he’d been depicting burst into leaf, he persuaded the owner, contra natura, to strip off all the foliage.  Halfway through the Poplars series he heard they were about to be cut down, so he bought the entire grove along the river bank in order to finish his work.  He diverted the river Epte to form his own pond.  His special gardener (one of six) working from a boat and solely responsible for the water lilies, soaked every pad to remove the dust and cleaned the surface of the pond.  Monet was the first and perhaps the only artist in history to invent a landscape in order to paint it.  The sinuous lilies echoed the lines of Art Nouveau and eventually lapsed into abstraction.  His pictures captured the elusive atmosphere of the pond, which seemed to disappear into his flowery waters and watery flowers.

The Four Trees, (Four Poplars on the Banks of the Epte River near Giverny), by Claude Monet (1891)

Many artist-friends criticised the dead-end repetition of the series pictures.  Pissarro thought they did “not represent a highly developed art”.  Degas believed the beautiful decorations were “made to sell”. Renoir found them retrograde and called the large lilies “marvelous targets for firing practice!”  Even the loyal Alice was glad when Monet painted “something other than the eternal water lilies”. Yet Georges Clemenceau — President of the Third Republic and his closest friend, after helping to create the future of postwar Europe at the Versailles Peace Conference — found time to arrange the donation to France of the enormous water lily paintings and to create a special site in L’Orangerie to display them.  The floating island-pads expose their coloured flowers to the sky.

The Water Lilies – Setting Sun by Claude Monet (1920–1926)

More could be said about Monet’s major works.  He painted the Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1867) at his aunt’s seaside house outside Le Havre.  One couple is seated, one standing on the sun-soaked, flower-filled terrace overlooking the sea.  The ladies hold parasols, the gentlemen carry walking sticks; one of them wears a panama, the other a top hat.  In this tautly constructed picture, the distance between the top of the fence and the horizon of the sea is exactly the same as between the horizon and the bottom of the fluttering flags that frame and focus the seascape.  The figures are surrounded by red flowers on three sides of the terrace, the blue sea lies in front, the white terrace and umbrella are in the foreground, and they all match the tricolor of the flying French flag.  The pointed jib of the nearby sailboat echoes the point of the red and yellow pennant; and the puffs of smoke from the steamboats drift into the striated clouds.

Jardin à Sainte-Adresse by Claude Monet (1866 – 1867)

In Magpie in the Snow (1869), the heavy snow on the ground, fence and roof is illuminated by a brilliant winter sun in a grey sky, which casts violet shadows, slanting down from left to right, on the yellow-flecked white foreground.  The snowscape is contrasted to the tiny, solitary, black bird, the only living creature in the bleak scene, ominously perched on the crooked gate and surveying the blankness.  Wullschläger ignores the physical and folklore significance of the black bird.  It is cunning and thievish, associated with witchcraft and—as with Brueghel’s Magpie in the Gallows (1568)—with death.  Like the young and impoverished Monet, it has no food, sings a whining song and is buffeted by a desolate climate.

The Magpie by Claude Monet (1868-1869)

The vertiginous Church at Varengeville, Morning Effect (1882) portrays the serpentine life that seems to be slithering out of the sea and surging up the steep jagged red-streaked cliff, seen from far below.  A Poesque church with five pointed roofs (which was actually a hundred yards back from the edge of the cliff) is precariously perched on its wavy crest and seems about to topple over and crash into the sea.

Church at Varengeville, Morning by Claude Monet (1882)

The spectacular Manneporte (“great portal”) had been created in Normandy by the ferocious pounding of the waves that punched a hole through the rock.  In The Manneporte, High Tide (1885), the famous arch, with its massive scale and rough texture, looks like the thighs of a giant, cut off at the waist and knees, yet striding through the turbulent surface of the sea.  Hokusai’s print Fuji Seen from the Seashore (c.1847) has the same rocky form and huge natural hole as Monet’s Manneporte.

The Manneport at High Tide by Claude Monet
(1885)

Wullschläger could have said more about the fruits of Monet’s 1895 winter trip to Norway.   She does not quote Saul Bellow’s brilliant description of Monet’s Sandviken, Norway (Chicago: Art Institute, 1895) in Humboldt’s Gift (1975): “There was one Norwegian winter landscape by Monet that we always went to see straightaway: a house, a bridge, and the snow falling.  Through the covering snow came the pink of the house, and the frost was delicious.  The whole weight of snow, of winter, was lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light . . . by this pure rosy snowy dusky light.”

The Rouen Cathedrals (1894) were Monet’s most successful series: “To see the façade close up, for the only time in his life, he worked on a major subject indoors, looking out through the window from a cramped, makeshift studio in a millinery shop.” Surrounding himself with his work-in-progress, Monet raced back and forth between these canvases, painting a whole sequence simultaneously, just as a silent film director rushed from scene to scene.  His paintings, almost exactly contemporary with the Lumière brothers’ first displays of moving images, were motion pictures.  Monet’s eye was the camera, the cathedral his image, the paint his unexposed film, the canvas his screen.  In his Cathedrals, as in the movies, there are close-ups and long-shots, gliding images and fade-outs, the flow of action from one scene to another and, the specialité de maison, the sovereignty of flickering light.

Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight by Claude Monet (1894)

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published five books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real. 

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