The Artist

The Artist's Garden at Giverny
Project
Claude Monet

Volunteer:
Date:
Grade level:	5th Grade
Artist:	Claude Monet
Print/Sculpture:	The Artist's Garden at Giverny
Art Vocabulary:	Impressionist Landscape Series paintings Color Light

The Artist: Claude Monet

Claude Oscar Monet was a French impressionist painter who brought the study of the transient effects of natural light to its most refined expression.

Monet was born November 14, 1840, in Paris, but he spent most of his childhood in LeHavre. There, in his teens, he studied drawing; he also painted seascapes outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boudin. By 1859 Monet had committed himself to a career as an artist and began to spend as much time in Paris as possible. During the 1860s he was associated with the pre-impressionist painter Edouard Manet, and with other aspiring French painters destined to form the impressionist school – Camille Pissaro, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.

Working outside, Monet painted simple landscapes and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and he began to have some success at official exhibitions. As his style developed, however, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the interest of direct artistic expression. His experiments in rendering 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.

In 1874, Monet and his colleagues decided to appeal directly to the public by organizing their own exhibition. They called themselves independents, but the press soon derisively labeled them impressionists because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet's paintings had borne the title Impression: Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). Monet's compositions from this time are extremely loosely structured, and the color was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression of nature. During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France, especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant effects of light and color possible.

By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the impressionist school, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. Despite the boldness of his color and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he was recognized as a master of meticulous observation, an artist who sacrificed neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his own feelings. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began to construct a water garden (now open to the public) – a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo.

Beginning on 1906, paintings of the pond and the water lilies occupied him for the remainder of his life; they hang in the Orangerie, Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Throughout these years he also worked on his other celebrated "series" paintings, groups of works representing the same subject – haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the River Seine – seen in varying light, at different times of the day or seasons of the year. Despite failing eyesight, Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, December 5, 1926, at Giverny.

Claude Monet is a very important painter. The Chicago Art Institute had a retrospective exhibit of some of his later works and thousands of people lined up for hours for a chance to see those paintings. A Frenchman of the 19th century, Monet changed the way painters look at nature, light, and colors. He and his immediate followers, the Impressionists, heralded modern art.

Write 2 colors of adjectives like these on the board:

successful
rich
honored

scorned
penniless
alienated

When you think of artists and their relationships to society, which group of adjectives comes first to your mind?

What used to come to mind at the mention of the word "artist" was the image of an outcast rejected by society, struggling to make a living, but uncompromisingly following his own vision of the beautiful. If he was lucky, he might gain recognition in later life, but in the meantime, his only source of professional satisfaction came from the knowledge that he was being true to his own self. Andy Warhol, of course, has changed this perception of the artist's social status. But the Impressionist painters, with Monet as their undisputed leader, are responsible for creating the view of the artist scorned by his contemporaries and only belatedly recognized.

Monet was the son of a shopkeeper. His father intended him to become a businessman and to take over the family grocery store. But Monet had a passion for art. Instead of studying in school, he would draw caricatures of his teachers and make little sketches in the margins of his books. As a teenager, he earned some pocket money by making caricatures and portraits of the people about town and selling them for a few francs. it was not much money, just enough to give him the illusion he could be independent of his father. Monsieur Monet was very much opposed to his son's avocation, but finally accepted a compromise: As long as Claude studied in a studio of a respected teacher in Paris, he would receive a small monthly allowance.

So, Claude went to Paris to study under Monsieur Gleyre. There he behaved like a dandy: He was poor, but he wore shirts with lace at the cuffs! Every student noticed his self-assurance. After Monet had completed a drawing of a male model, his teacher expressed disapproval. He said, "How does it happen, Monsieur, that seeing a model with sturdy legs you paint them as they are?! What you're painting is fine, but it's too much like the original!" A painter at that time was expected to make things and people look more beautiful than reality and to conform to certain traditional rules of proportions.

Monet left Mr. Gleyre's studio, taking with him several of his newly made friends, in particular Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, who were both going to become very famous one day. Now Monet had no money. At times, he could not afford to pay his rent and he had to leave without paying for his room, hoping the landlord would accept a painting or two in exchange. For weeks at a time, he would eat nothing but beans or lentils. At least he was free Instead of working in the confining environment of an artificially lit studio, he chose to paint outdoors, in the open air. It was cheap, too. Nature became his studio, and Monet demonstrated the first lesson of Impressionism: Paint nature directly and faithfully. Monet would set up his easel outside, sometimes in very uncomfortable circumstances: On top of a windy hill, where it was hard to keep the canvas from blowing over, or in the cold, where the fingers grew numb quickly. He painted landscapes and seascapes (he had no money for a model), boats bobbing on the waves, green meadows filled with red poppies, overbearing cliffs, craggy mountain sides. Monet would make dozes of sketches of the same scene so as to know all of its angles well.

Monet tried to work fast and to complete each picture in one sitting, but it did not always work out that way. Once, he painted a huge old oak tree in a mountain canyon. It was the end of winter; the tree was bare, its naked branches stretching skyward; it made the place look more rugged and wild. Monet had already made several paintings when the weather turned to rain and he had to stop painting. For three weeks he stayed indoors, trapped like an animal in a cage. When he finally was able to return to the old oak tree, it was covered with pale green buds. Monet, undaunted, hired the help of a carpenter and other villagers to remove the new growths and requested that the tree be made completely bare again by the same time next morning. Thus, he was able to resume his paintings of the poor tree.

Since Monet worked fast, he did not have time for a lot of details, His goal was to capture the fleeting moment, the ever-changing effects of light on trees and flowers. He wanted to catch the first impression one gets when looking at a landscape. He tried to convey a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. Show the portrait of Woman with Umbrella Turned to Right, for example.

What do you see on the picture?

A young lady carrying an umbrella is walking in a meadow.

Quickly, give me five adjectives to describe her. Is she pretty or attractive? Young? Graceful? Romantically posed against a cloudy sky? Elegant? Buffeted by the wind? Is she real or some kind of apparition? Weightless almost? Unearthly, ethereal? An intangible as the rays of light which seem to give her a form?

Ask one student to come to the board and tell the others what her face looks like. what the color of her eyes?

Her face is almost blank. There is only a bare suggestion of eyes, nose and red mouth. Not much detail at all. This young woman is rendered exactly as she is seen from afar, at first glace. She is an unfocused form on the retina of the yes, merely an image of gracefulness, youth, and softness. Monet gave us a first impression of a lovely young woman walking against the wind.

And now you understand where the name Impressionism came from: First impression. Except that when it was first used, it was meant as a joke, a derogatory comment on the evanescent character of Monet's paintings. The journalist who coined the word "impressionism" was making fun of Monet. The satirical newspaper, Le Charivari, he described his reaction to a painting by Monet entitled Impression: Sunrise, "Impression – I knew it. I was just saying to myself, if I'm impressed, there must be an impression in there... And what freedom, what ease in the brushwork! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more labored than this seascape!" (April 25, 1874). Some spectators laughed and shrugged their shoulders; other became angry and even tried to hit the Impressionist canvases with their canes. Cartoonists advised pregnant women not to come close to an Impressionist painting as the sight of such monstrosity would distress them and their unborn babies too much. Very few people liked what they saw because Monet and his Impressionist friends were not following the rules of traditional art. Here are three ways in which their works departed from the traditional:

Their pictures looked unfinished. If you look at them closely, you could see irregular brushstrokes, a blur of colors. Sometimes even a piece of unpainted canvas showed through. You had to stand back in order to recognize the theme of the painting and to appreciate the overall effect that was attempted.
The Impressionist painters used many bright colors and NO BLACK. Can you image? There actually was no black outlines around the objects or bodies in Monet's paintings! He had the audacity to pretend that objects are not separated from the atmosphere that surround them by black lines, and that black is an unknown color in nature!
Finally, Monet and his friends often chose unlikely subjects for their paintings. Landscapes were all right, but what about trains and sooty stations? The proper subjects of paintings were important people, buildings or events of the past. But Monet decided that smoke puffing from the chimney-stack of a steam engine was a glorious sight to be rendered, a real challenge for a painter of light and fog like himself. Show Gare St. Lazare painting which is exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute. Here is how the son of Renoir described Monet's painting of the locomotives in the Parisian train station. Remember that Monet was a nobody in the art world then. He had no credibility whatsoever.

"One fine day [Monet] said to Renoir triumphantly: 'I've got it! The Gare St. Lazare! I'll show it just as the trains are starting, with smoke from the engines so thick you can hardly see a thing. It's a fascinating sight, a regular dream world.'

He did not, of course, intend to paint it from memory. He would paint it in situ so as to capture the play of sunlight on the steam rising from the locomotives.

'I'll get them to delay the train for Rouen half an hour. The light will be better then.'

'You're mad,' said Renoir.

Monet, however, seemed to rise above all contingencies. He put on his best clothes, ruffled the lace at his wrists, and twirling his gold-headed cane went off to the offices of the Western Railway where he sent his card to the director. The usher, overawed, immediately showed him in. The director asked Monet to be seated. His visitor introduced himself modestly as 'the painter, Claude Monet.' The head of the company knew nothing about painting, but did not quite dare to admit it. Monet allowed his host to flounder about for a moment, then deigned to announce the purpose of his visit.

'I have decided to paint your station. For some time I've been hesitating between your station and the Gare du Nord, but I think that yours has more character.'

He was given permission to do what he wanted. The trains were all halted; the platforms were cleared; the engines were crammed with coal so as to give out all the smoke Monet desired. Monet established himself in the station as a tyrant and painted amid respectful awe. He finally department with a half-dozen or so picture, while the entire personnel, the director of the company at their head, bowed him out."

Monet: A Retrospective, ed. Charles F. Stuckey, pp.64-65)

It took a lot of brass to pull something like that!

Show another painting by Monet, The Magpie, a snowscape with a few bare trees, a fence smothered under a heavy layer of snow and a gate on which a magpie is resting. Look at the shadows of the fence and the gate.

What color are they?

Not black, but purple. The head of the magpie is the only thing that appears black against the white background. Ask a student to come close to describe what he sees.

The surface of the canvas is heavily textured; there are cracks in the thick paint in the top portion of the picture.
Many different hues of offwhites and browns have been used to render the whiteness of the snow; the sky and the snow almost merge in the same colors.

An American painter, Lilla Cabot Perry, said of Monet that his "philosophy of painting was to paint WHAT YOU REALLY SEE, NOW WHAT YOU THINK YOU OUGHT TO SEE: Not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere" (Monet: A Retrospective, pp. 183-184). The magpie in the painting cannot be separated from the light that surrounds it. Monet was so intent on capturing the unique light that bathes an object in nature during a unique instant in time that he began painting series of the same scene at different times of the day or the year. Thus, he painted series of haystacks, same point of view, but at different times of the day. He would work on several canvases at the same time, maybe a dozen or so, and pick up each one in turn. Thus, he painted his poplars "from a broad-bottomed boat fitted up with grooves to hold a number of canvases." He said that "in one of [the Poplars] the effect [that is, the particular light condition he was trying to catch] lasted only seven minutes, or until the sunlight left a certain leaf, when he took out the next canvas and worked on that" (Monet: A Retrospective, pp. 184). The next morning, he would return to the same spot and try to catch again the effect that had eluded him before.

Slowly Monet began to gain recognition as the great artist he was, and he was able to sell his pictures instead of having people laugh at them. As he became more financially secure, he settled into the little French village of Giverny, west of Paris, and he gave himself up to his passion for gardening. It turned out to be a very expensive passion for he created three complex and highly unusual gardens. At first, he planted patches of flowers as people plant patches of carrots or cabbages, in tight, straight, tidy rows and in great abundance, but always with an eye for colors and harmony. In early spring, patches of tulips, some with striped or mottled petals, bloomed brightly as well as many varieties of poppies. In June, roses of all shapes and sizes, irises and orchids burst out with colors. In September, dahlias of every type, and at the end of the month, sunflowers and anemones. All spring and summer long, Monet's garden was an explosion of colors.

Monet also bought a large ordinary meadow planted with willows and transformed it. He flooded it by diverting water from a little river that flowed nearby, built a pond with two valves to renew the water daily, a special grill to slow down the current, and a small Japanese footbridge. Then, in the pond he grew exotic varieties of water lilies. At first, the neighbors, all farmers with practical concerns, were in an uproar: Monet, who was a painter was already a very suspicious sort of character, was now trying to poison their cattle with those peculiar-looking flowers from faraway places. The farmers would no longer be able to let their cows drink from the water which had passed through the pond. But the uproar quieted down and the farmers learned to tolerate the vagaries of their eccentric and artistic neighbor.

Eccentric Monet was in yet another way. The garden was his studio as well. It was very important for him that the colors of the flowers remain as bright as possible. He had seven gardeners tending the flowers, trimming them even before they were going to lose their brilliance. He had the dirt road in front of his property paved at his own expense in order to keep dust off the blooms and every morning he had one of his gardeners sprinkle each lily pad individually with water to remove traces of dust.

Show the painting The Artist’s Garden at Giverny. What do you see? A garden path, a few trees on either side, and a profusion of flowers all around.

Can you tell what time of the year this is?

Early spring, because tulips are blooming in full glory and the foliage of the trees is a tender pale green.

What are the dominant colors in the picture?

Secondary colors mostly:

Different shades of green, pale and dark. In some instances, you can see that Monet "made" the color green by putting side by side hues of blue and yellow. Look at the foliage of the tulips in the foreground in particular. Seen from afar those hues of blue and yellow look green.
Different shades of pink and purple veering toward blue;
And some white.

All in all, Monet used a very limited, simple palette to create an exposition of colors.

Do you see black anywhere? No. The flowers and the trees are not outlined artificially. They emerge from the ambient light.

The Painting: The Artist’s Garden at Giverny

III

Composition of Artwork

Line: Horizontals and verticals achieved through placement of path, rows of flowers, trees, horizon, background and foreground.

Balance: Placement of trees

Rhythm: The entire garden is flowing and involved in movement. How is this achieved?

Color: Daubs and dots; Colors placed side by side to achieve an effect rather than being mixed beforehand. How is light achieved?

Perspective: Background/foreground; Horizon; Depth to path.

Ask students to describe:

Time of year/elements (groups of flowers, etc.)
Colors (lack of black); limited to certain group
Way paint is put on canvas
Difference in view (close up/far away), etc.

Artist’s Materials or Techniques

"Daubs or dots of color that are recognizable from a distance."

"Light is not merely white or yellow, but rich with color. If you mix colors on your palette the results are muddy and dull, but if you put them side by side and stand back from the canvas, they blend in your eyes and make a livelier effect."

Discussed "impressionism." Used exhibit catalog to supplement and print of "sunset...." to show different landscapes.

Students’ Self-Expression: Guided Activity

Materials: Oil pastels, paper

Information location: Oil pastel technique is given in storage room container

Practice technique briefly with students first stress: Types of strokes and use of color through placement of color next to each other or on top of each other if varying thickness and blending with fingers to get desired effect.

Activity: Students choose one flower and are asked to draw quickly, first with only 2 colors, then 3 colors and finally 4 colors. The bottom section to be drawn as a garden using many colors. Students completed works can be cut apart to assemble a bulletin board "garden."

This activity helps students to focus on color as a specific element they see in an object and to see the effect adding a color has on the eye of a drawing object. Encourage students to put "raw" color on without blending, as the Impressionists did. Let their "eyes" blend it.

Alternate project: If weather permits, take the class in front of the school building in order to paint outside in the manner of Monet and other Impressionists. Beforehand, pick up the large pieces of matting in the Cultural Arts storage closet. These can be used as backing when the children are working on their knees. Clip a sheet of paper (preferably paper designed for drawing with pastels) to each piece of matting. Make sure you have one for each child in the classroom.

2 Colors	3 Colors	4 Colors
Unlimited Use of Color Bulletin Board Display

Once outside, ask the children to focus on one object or detail in the facade of the school building. For example, a gargoyle, a group of two windows, the archway around the entrance doors, the railing on the stairs. A natural object can also be chosen as a theme: A tree (a bare tree would provide an analogy with the old oak tree Monet had villagers strip so that it would look as it had three weeks before), a bush, dandelions, clouds, etc. Get the children to focus on the one object or composition they have chosen.

Let them either sketch their composition with a pencil or black charcoal, or paint it with oil pastels. When using oil pastels, place colors side by side or on top of each other. Use varying thicknesses and/or blend with fingers or paper towels in order to obtain the desired shades.

After the class is over, assemble the children’s compositions on a bulletin board in order to create a park. Different elements can be added to the board to bring the different compositions together: a picture of the school facade, other architectural elements, clouds, or trees.

Bibliography on Monet

Stuckey, Charles F., editor, Monet: A Retrospective, Park Lane, New York, 1985, Riverside Library #759.4 MON.

This book has excellent large reproductions of Monet’s works and a varied selection of articles written by contemporaries of Monet or people who knew him personally.

Jones, Mark Powell, Impressionist Painting, available at the Riverside Public Library.

This book shows good detail of Monet’s brushstrokes on pp. 21-22.

Bjork, Christina, Linnea in Monet’s Garden, R&S Books, Stockholm and New York, 1985, available at the Central School Library.

This book is a children’s book and has beautiful photographs of Monet and his family and reproductions of Monet’s paintings.

Venezia, Mike, Monet, in the series: Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists, Children’s Press. Chicago, 1990, available at the Central School Library.

This book is a children’s book complete with simple text, cartoons, and lovely reproductions. A copy of the book is included in the Cultural Arts folder.

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