Monet Across Three Decades: From Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden to Meadows at Giverny

Monet – Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (1866)

Monet – Corner of the Garden at Montgeron (1876)

Monet – Pond at Montgeron (1876)

Monet – Meadows at Giverny (1888)

The exhibition Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration at the Hermitage Amsterdam – contextualising Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas and Sisley by juxtaposing them with their 19th Century forebears, contemporary Salon artists, intermediaries and successors; and which I mentioned in a previous piece on Cézanne’s Banks of the Marne – ended last weekend. I visited on Sunday and looked in particular at four canvases by Claude Monet, placed consecutively but at some distance apart in the largest of the exhibition’s rooms, showing Monet’s art across three decades of his career.

Together they demonstrate the way in which Monet’s work moved through and beyond Impressionism. Often considered the arch Impressionist, typifying the movement’s emphases on painting en plein air, and using vivid colours to display the transitory effects of sunlight, Monet’s art should not be reduced and perceived only as a mirror of the movement. The four paintings show different approaches to composition, and Monet achieving Impressionistic results then extending his art in the direction of pure subjectivity, tending towards abstraction. They show too that a vastly diminished palette can produce something which more closely depicts the way we see, and which abounds more fully in light.

The earliest painting on display, Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (also known as Woman in the Garden, Sainte-Adresse), was completed in 1866, when Monet was just twenty-six years old. It appears the most composed, the most ordered of the four paintings; and well demonstrates Monet’s predilection for painting ordered nature, in the form of gardens and enclosed scenes. Three principal objects – Jeanne-Marguerite; the central white tree, in bloom, with red flowers underneath; and the yellower tree to the right – and their shadows, at equal distance from one another, structure the space. The vibrant reds of the flower bed complement the greenery, and throw the woman’s white, sun-lit dress into relief. There is a visual progression also from the vivid white of the dress through the blooming central tree, to the smaller trees and flowers which enclose the scene at the far right.

Monet would later depict shadows comprised of shades of blue, even in paintings of the summer. His experimentation with blue shadows was one of the things which led critics of his work in Paris in the 1870s to call his works ‘leprous’. In Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden the shadows are dark and solid, and the use of blue delimited to the sky in the upper right corner of the painting. The effect suggests a warm and still summer day. Yet the stillness of the sky, a block of blue more steely than azure; the solidity of the shadows and the other darker tones in the painting; its order; and the relative flatness of the canvas, of the brushstrokes in the grass and in the trees in the background – all this gives a sense of something staged and static. The light which illuminates the woman’s umbrella is not as luminous upon and does not pick out in the same way the trees to the picture’s centre and right. The overall atmosphere becomes somewhat unsettling, an image approximating that of the geometrically defined garden which features, intercut, in the film Last Year at Marienbad.

With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, Monet spent eight months in England, then four in the Netherlands before returning to France. The painters he was able to study during this time – notably Turner and Constable – significantly influenced the specifics of his art. In 1876 he completed a series of four canvases commissioned by Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store magnate, and intended to furnish the drawing room of his château at Montgeron, on the outskirts to the south-east of Paris. The two paintings Corner of the Garden at Montgeron and Pond at Montgeron are more Impressionistic in their quicker, looser brushstrokes: the former lifted by a vivid and lively cyan-blue sky atop distant hills; the latter capturing a woman who leans on the trunk of a tree whilst she fishes, the sunlight breaking through the trees in a flurry of light-blue horizontals reflecting off the pond’s water. The two paintings depict a wilder, obviously much more expansive garden, and Monet’s handling of light is more consistent.

Still, there is something potentially problematic inherent in Monet’s methodological imperative. His insistence on painting in nature, attempting to capture the essence of its fleeting moments, encourages the quick application of unmixed colour – and the result can sometimes be slightly jarring, lacking in subtlety, the colours not quite coming together. The use of a limited palette is a logical and practical extension of Monet’s devotion towards painting en plein air.

Meadows at Giverny was painted twelve years after the Montgeron canvases, in 1888. Through the course of those twelve years, Monet lost his wife. Camille – who frequently modelled for Monet as well as Manet and Renoir, and with whom Monet had two children – died of illness in 1879. In 1883, Monet discovered Giverny, a commune on the right bank of the Seine in northern France. He rented a house there and moved with his family, which now comprised not only his children, but also Alice Hoschedé and hers: the two families had lived together briefly before Camille died and before Ernest moved to Belgium in the late 70s; and Monet and Alice would marry in 1892 after Ernest’s death. By 1888 Monet was emerging from the poverty he and his family had suffered through the late 60s and 70s, with Paul Durand-Ruel selling more and more of his works. He was able to buy his house at Giverny, plus additional land, in 1890, and would live there until his own death in 1926.

In Meadows at Giverny there are four predominant colours – two greens, an ochre and a lilac-grey. With the minor addition of a few strokes of pink and blue – the blue a variation, a darker tone of the lilac-grey, used in the shadows – these colours alone comprise the painting. This canvas as well as any suggests Cézanne description of Monet’s talent: ‘Nothing but an eye, but, my God, what an eye’. The brushstrokes are short and close and criss-cross in the foreground, and are more sweeping in the sky; the paint is laid thickly, producing an awareness of fluid shape and texture. The colours interplay harmoniously, the atmosphere is airy; the painting stands as a pure evocation of light.

Banks of the Marne, by Cézanne

The Hermitage Amsterdam is currently home to two complementary exhibitions. The first, Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration, with a tagline explaining that the works on display are ‘Highlights from the Hermitage’, endeavours to place the Impressionists within their French Nineteenth Century context. It shows Neoclassicists Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, the Romanticism of Delacroix – who Van Gogh regarded as the supreme colourist, and about whom he wrote in September, 1888,

‘Now, it is true that I see in impressionism a resurrection of Eugène Delacroix, but as the interpretations are both divergent and also rather irreconcilable, impressionism cannot yet formulate a doctrine. That is why I am staying with the impressionists, because it means nothing, and commits you to nothing, and as one of them I do not have to take up any position.’

– and intermediaries, including Charles-François Daubigny and Carolus-Duran, alongside Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley and Renoir.

The second exhibition, entitled simply Vincent, with the subtitle ‘The Van Gogh Museum at the Hermitage’, shows a selection from the Van Gogh Museum’s collection whilst that museum is undergoing refurbishment in order to meet updated Dutch safety and security regulations. The exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically, the seven themes comprising, in order, ‘Practice makes perfect’, ‘A style of his own’, ‘The effect of colour’, ‘Peasant painter’, ‘Looking to Japan’, ‘The modern portrait’, and ‘The wealth of nature’. Whilst some of the earlier themes in particular are conceptually slight, the exhibition itself is coherent and succeeds in providing novel points of connection. Impressionism is open until January 27; whereas Vincent will run until the end of April, when the Van Gogh Museum will reopen with a major exhibition celebrating the museum’s fortieth anniversary, to be called Van Gogh at Work.

I visited Impressionism last weekend, and especially admired a painting by Cézanne, Banks of the Marne (1888). Cézanne achieves in this painting one of the purest and most convincing depictions of water I’ve seen; and he does this by largely replicating the river bank in the water below, presenting a reflection that is almost a mirror image. The trees and the residence on land appear reflected at the same angle, and with the same dimensions. Cézanne’s palette – with its predominant blue-greens offset by the white villa and its ochre roof and balcony – also remains constant, with the darker tones in the water serving to differentiate and providing a sense of depth. Whilst there is nothing amounting to a rippled brushstroke, the short and dense diagonals which give the trees their matter are replaced in Cézanne’s water by looser horizontals.

Around 1888 when Cézanne painted Banks of the Marne, he also worked on a number of other water paintings, experimenting with different ways of representing, different ways of bringing his canvases together. Bridge over the Marne at Créteil, with its view looking down the river, features geometric curves and larger blocks of colour as trees, reflected in the water with vertical rather than horizontal brushwork. From the same period, the more abstract Bridge over a Pool consists of a mass of vivid green diagonals which encroach upon and enclose the bridge, the water only delineated by some darker tones and shadows; and Aqueduct and Lock repeats Banks of the Marne‘s trick, the aqueduct immediately mirrored in the water below, here slightly extended and outlined, with unfastened foliage hovering above on each side.

Banks of the Marne recalls an earlier work, Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), which Cézanne completed between 1879 and 1881, Zola having bought the house in 1878. The painting depicts the banks of the Seine – of which the Marne is a tributary, running southeast from Paris – in an unusually rigid and symmetrical fashion: whereas Banks of the Marne is broadly split into river bank and river, here the canvas is divided into the five horizontal sections of river, river bank, houses, hills and sky, with tall trees rising vertically at regular intervals between the houses. Cézanne’s palette is much brighter, the sensation sunnier, with intense yellows, greens and ochres and a bold blue sky. Still, both paintings confront the viewer in a similar way: we look directly across a stretch of water towards a river bank, densely leafy, something solidly constructed and impenetrable. Like in the later painting, so here Cézanne indicates those reflections in the water through more loosely painted, horizontal brushstrokes.

De Leeuw, R. (ed.) The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans (Penguin, 1997)