Claude Monet was one of the key figures of Impressionism, the movement which revolutionized French painting during the nineteenth century. His paintings of leisurely activities and landscapes like Giverny show that he created an aesthetic capable of depicting nature on canvas in its full depth.
Water Lilies
Claude Monet was a key founding figure of Impressionism, helping define it with his unique approach to landscape painting. While other contemporary landscape artists relied on precise representations of nature for inspiration, Monet sought instead to express visual sensations he experienced outdoors – a practice which eventually inspired what became known as impressionism: rapid brushstrokes to capture fleeting moments of light.
Monet’s career spanned decades of painting series on subjects ranging from Fountainbleau forests and Parisian boulevards, suburban gardens, seaside towns, stacks of hay (known in French as meules) and stacks of hay. Soon after moving to Giverny northwest of Paris in 1883, he started landscaping a garden which included a water lily pond that inspired this series devoted to capturing their fleeting beauty on water surfaces.
Over 25 years, he produced around 60 large-scale paintings depicting water lilies at different times of day and capturing their effect as shifting sunlight moved across his garden. One version, entitled Water Lilies and now on view at both Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art features flowers floating on an unifying surface composed of violet, blue and green hues.
The Garden at Giverny
Monet, one of the pioneering Impressionist painters, found himself inspired to paint outdoors by the landscapes around him. Eugene Boudin introduced him to plein air painting – an approach which allowed him to capture natural lighting as it changed throughout a day or year – which Monet used when painting his series of water lilies at Giverny.
Monet cultivated his flowers with the same dedication and innovation he brought to his paintings. At home in Giverny, he built an expansive flower garden as well as his iconic water pond which would inspire numerous paintings. Furthermore, he also had a studio equipped with glass walls so he could move his canvas in front of him for different views or angles.
Monet was one of the pioneers of 19th-century gardening who took pleasure and inspiration from cultivating gardens as ornamental features in mansions and castles, leading a movement to plant them for enjoyment and inspiration. He designed his flowerbeds around color themes so they would provide him with plenty of subject matter to draw inspiration from.
Claude Monet’s paintings are an ode to his passion for art, and we offer Claude Monet Prints by him that will add an impressionist touch to your home. Place Water Lilies or The Artist’s Garden at Giverny to set the mood or brighten up an office workstation!
The Beach at Saint-Adresse
Monet’s painting depicting Sainte-Adresse Beach near Le Havre shows his fascination with how light and weather altered landscape. His signature painterly style broke from traditional conventions of his day; here you can see gray skies, shoreline boats and fishermen on the beach all suggest autumn rather than the summer influx of tourists that Monet alluded to in other works.
Monet employed brilliant passages of rapid brushwork and bold bursts of color in his painting to convey his impressions of the landscape. He created significant color associations, linking red flags with red flowers on lily pads, blue in the distance with sky and water and horizontal/vertical lines to show movement on both sand and sea surfaces.
Monet painted this work while staying at his aunt’s home in Sainte-Adresse, an affluent suburb of Le Havre. It seems to have been created as an additional companion piece for the Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (Metropolitan Museum of Art) painted the same year; that one depicts well-dressed spectators watching white sails on an otherwise sunny day; these two paintings share similar dimensions with only minor differences between their points of views separating them.
The Sunflowers
Claude Monet is best-known for his contributions to Impressionist art movement. Born in Paris on November 14, 1840, Monet began his artistic journey as a caricaturist before turning his focus towards painting which ultimately became his lifelong passion. Monet also experimented with different artistic forms such as sketching and drawing during this period – often depicting buildings rising out of fog or towering above sun-gilded waters in his earlier pieces.
Monet would experiment with lighting in his paintings by painting subjects at various times of day to capture its changing effects, and his Rouen Cathedral series serves as an illustration. Here, the same cathedral appears as seen from different vantage points – in sunlight, shadow and twilight.
Monet turned his focus to flowers during the late 1890s, creating the Nympheas cycle of waterscape paintings containing delicate water lilies and floating flowers. Each painting differs in terms of light, color, detail and composition but all share an overall cohesive style; Monet employed complementary color harmony and limited ranges of value that were both hallmarks of his flower paintings that were shown at the seventh Impressionist exhibition and highly acclaimed both critics and public alike.