Monet's Private Picture Gallery at Giverny

MONET’S PRIVATE PICTURE GALLERY AT GIVERNY Sylvie Patin

éditions Claude Monet Giverny

Monet’s Monets 1

8

7

2

9

3

10

5

13

12

11

14

15

16

4 6

17

18

19

20

22

21

1. Fishing Boats, Etretat, 1885, Honfleur, Musée Eugène-Boudin, Gift of Michel Monet, 1964 2. View of Rouen, 1892, Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts 3. Cap Martin, 1884, Private Collection 4. The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1881, Washington, National Gallery of Art 5. Rouen Cathedral, Façade (Sunset), 1892, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 6. Water Lilies, Evening Effect, 1897-1899, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 7. île de la Grande Jatte, 1878, Tokyo, Nichido Gallery 8. Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny, 1887, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 9. Boats in the Port of Honfleur (sketch), 1917, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966

12. Charing Cross Bridge (sketch), 1899-1901, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 13. Poly, Fisherman at Belle-île, 1886, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest,1966 14. The Creuse Valley, Evening Effect, 1889, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 15. Charing Cross Bridge, Smoke in the Fog, Impression, 1899-1901, dated 1902, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 16. Houses of Parliament, Reflctions in the Thames, 1900-1901, dated 1905, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966 17. Pink Water Lilies, 1897-9, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna 18. Haystack, 1891, France, Private Collection 19. Three Fishing Boats, 1885, Private Collection 20. The Red Cape (Madame Monet), 1873, Cleveland Museum of Art

10. Norwegian Landscape, Blue Houses, 1895, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966

21. White Clematis, 1887, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966

11. Charing Cross Bridge, 1899-1901, Indianapolis Museum of Art

22. Boating on the River Epte, 1890, São Paulo, Museu de Arte Assis Chateaubriand

T

Family Life: A Loving Husband and Father

it as “a painting of a woman at some French windows in a wintry landscape, as beautiful as a Vermeer” (Journal d’un collectionneur Marchand de tableaux, “Saturday 17 July [1926], Claude Monet’s house”). In his later portrait of her, Camille holding a Posy of Violets, she appears as an enigmatic apparition, lost in her thoughts.

Camille’s health never recovered after the birth of Michel, and she died at the age of just thirty-two, as Monet announced to Dr de Bellio on 5 September 1879: “My poor wife succumbed this morning […] I write to ask one more favour of you: could you redeem the medallion we pawned at the Mont de Piété with the money I enclose. It was the only memento my wife managed to keep and I should like to put [it] round her neck before she leaves us.” This last loving gesture demonstrated the attachment Monet still felt for his first companion, which he shared with Clemenceau in his memories of the deathbed of “the woman who was and is still so very dear to me”. And without venturing to use her name, he went on to recall how painting and analysing colour was a constant preoccupation for him, to the point of prompting him to take up his brushes in her presence, to paint Camille on her Deathbed, a poignant instance of the immediate transition from visual perception to his habitual form of expression through the artistic process.

None of this escaped Alice Hoschedé, who did not appear on the walls of the drawing room-studio, a room in which she lived on a daily basis. Alice had sat with Camille during her illness in the house they shared at Vétheuil, and must have known that Camille belonged to Monet’s past, and was inextricably linked with his early works: having been his first model, she remained his model in death, in this moving portrait that he kept to the end of his life (Michel later gave it Katia Granoff, who in 1963 donated it to the Louvre; it is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris). Alice, on the contrary, never sat for Monet, and he never painted her; but he did send her promises and declarations of love in the countless letters he wrote daily to her when he was away on his painting trips. From Bordighera, for example, he wrote: “… You are constantly in my thoughts […] my heart is at Giverny, always and forever” and “you and my children are my whole life […] there is no happiness for me except with you, and I should like it to be more complete” (26 January and 1 February 1884). From Antibes he wrote, “you have in me a heart that loves you, someone on whom you can always count” (26 January 1888), and from Fresselines in the Creuse, “I miss Giverny and long to be at your side” and “Art and yourself are my only care, my sole concern” (26 and 28 April 1889).

On 16 July 1892 –following the death of Ernest Hoschedé the previous year– Monet married Alice, and four days later

he strength of the family bonds that united Monet with those close to him throughout his life is clear to see on the walls of the drawing room-studio at Giverny, where he appears touchingly as an affectionate father to his children and his stepchildren alike, and as a loyal husband who remained faithful to the memory of his first wife, Camille. As Lilla Cabot Perry observed in her Reminiscences 1889-1909, “This serious and focused man showed genuine tenderness and love towards the children.”

Just four days after the birth of his elder son, Jean, Monet told Bazille, whom he had asked to be godfather to the child, how he had experienced an immediate surge of paternal feeling for this “beautiful bouncing baby whom I feel I love, I don’t know how, in spite of everything”, adding that it pained him to think that his mother Camille, whom he had had to leave behind in Paris with their son, “has nothing to eat” (Sainte-Adresse, 12 August 1867). The following year, the contented father wrote to Bazille from Etretat: “Here I am surrounded by everything I love […] In the evening, dear friend, I come back to my little house to find a fine fire and a fine little family. If you could only see your godson, and how sweet he is now. My friend, it is an enchantment to watch this little person grow, and heaven knows I am so happy to have him. I shall paint him for the Salon…” (December 1868).

Devoted father though he was, when he was with his child he could not help his thoughts turning to painting and exhibiting at the Salon, as the father in him was overtaken by the artist. The portraits of his children and the Hoschedé girls, as well as those of Camille, were by no means conventional “family portraits”: first and foremost, these were images that were integral to Monet’s artistic development, and to his experiments in painting. His younger son, Michel, was born on 17 March 1878. In the early 1880s, Monet was to paint individual portraits of his sons, which Michel would later bequeath to the Académie des Beaux Arts (now at the Musée Marmottan in Paris).

The boys’ mother, Camille Doncieux (1847-1879), was a strong presence at Giverny, even though she had died and had been buried in the graveyard of the collegiate church at Vétheuil three years before Monet moved there. Camille was his first model, featuring in his early masterpieces such as Luncheon on the Grass, Woman in a Green Dress and Women in the Garden. They were married on 28 June 1870. She appeared in several of the paintings in the drawing roomstudio, most notably making an elegant and feminine figure in the snow at Argenteuil in The Red Cape, a composition which caught the attention of René Gimpel, who described

20

Claude Monet quoted by Georges Clemenceau (Claude Monet, Les Nymphéas, 1928)

he gave away her daughter Suzanne in marriage at Giverny church. In a letter to her fiancé, Theodore Butler, Suzanne stressed the close relationship that the Hoschedé girls enjoyed with Monet: “As for M. Monet, you cannot know how much I owe him, he has always surrounded us with deep and sincere affection… For me his is thus more than a friend, and he takes a fatherly interest in my future” (7 June 1892). Monet was deeply attached to the girls: “I hope it will not be too long before I see you, I too long to be with you […], Till very soon my darlings…” (letter to Suzanne and Blanche Hoschedé, Etretat, November 1885). Alice’s daughters –especially “the graceful Suzanne” (letter to Alice Hoschedé, 26 April 1889)– were to be his models.

Having abandoned portraiture in order to concentrate exclusively on nature, suddenly in 1886 –virtually for the last time– Monet inserted the human figure in the landscape once more, with two canvases that echoed each other.

Treating his subject as both a landscape painter and an Impressionist, he captured the immediate impression that had been made on him by a vision on a hillside at Giverny: the sight of Suzanne, then aged eighteen, inspired two version of Woman with a Parasol, which, significantly, he originally called Sketches of Figures in the Open Air (the title that appeared in the catalogue of the Durand-Ruel exhibition of Monet’s work in May 1891). But might this in fact be another vision of Camille? The young girl walking towards him through the field, outlined against the light and the sky, can hardly have failed to remind Monet of his earlier painting of his wife with their son Jean (The Promenade, now known as Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and her Son, 1875; Washington, National Gallery of Art), and all the more so as he scarcely sketched in Suzanne’s features, so that the figure barely seemed to resemble her. He was preoccupied with capturing the play of light and shade created by the parasol, the luminous “envelope” of light that surrounded the figure,

“

“

… at the deathbed of the woman who had been and was still so dear to me, I caught myself, as I gazed on her tragic brow, instinctively tracing the changing hues and gradations of colour that death was overlaying on her motionless features. Shades of blue, yellow, grey – how can I describe them? This was what I had come to. Nothing could be more natural than the desire to fix that final image of one who is about to depart this life forever. But even before the idea of capturing those dearly loved features had entered my mind, there it was: that instinct rooted deep within my being that trembled at the shock of their colours, and a reflex that drew me, despite myself, into a subconscious process in which the habits of daily life went on as before.

the scarf floating on the breeze, the billowing of the dress and the grasses bending in the wind, while the movement of the figure is echoed by the eddying clouds behind her.

On 13 August 1887, Monet wrote to Théodore Duret, “I am working as never before, and at new endeavours, figures in the open air as I see them, done like landscapes; but it’s so hard! Anyway, I struggle on, and it absorbs me to the point of almost making me ill…” These female figures have an immaterial feel, timeless and removed from reality, as noted

by Lilla Cabot Perry: “There were two paintings on the studio wall that I particularly loved. His stepdaughter in a white dress, a green voile scarf floating on the breeze, beneath a parasol, at the top of a slope and silhouetted against the sky.

He [Monet] tells me that an eminent critic dubbed them the Ascension and the Assumption!”

Suzanne died young, in 1899, leaving Alice inconsolable. The two paintings remained on the walls of the drawing roomstudio, where they caught the attention of René Gimpel, who mistakenly thought they featured two different models: “After a decade during which so many paintings have been removed from Monet’s house, not much remains, with the exception of two women who I believe to be his stepdaughters, standing with parasols” (Journal d’un collectionneur Marchand de tableaux, “Saturday 17 July [1926], Claude Monet’s house”). As early as 1927, the year after his father’s death, Michel donated the paintings to the French national museums (they are now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris).

The relationship between the Monet and Hoschedé families, which had been so close since the 1880s, was to be further strengthened in 1897 by the marriage between his elder son Jean (1867-1914) and Alice’s daughter Blanche (1865-1947), who often used to paint with Monet, and whom Clemenceau dubbed the “blue angel” for the care with which she looked after Monet for the fifteen years from Alice’s death, on 19 May 1911, until his own in 1926.

21

View of Rouen, 1892 Oil on canvas, 65 × 100 cm Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Haystack, 1891 65 × 92 cm Private collection.

Avignon, 1873 Oil on canvas, 46 × 33 cm Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966.

Port-Vendres, 1880 Watercolour, 17 × 24 cm Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966.

Jongkind

Tree-Lined Road, 1880 Watercolour, 15 × 24 cm Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966.

Woman drying Herself after the Bath, 1876-1877 Pastel on monotype on paper, 47.5 × 60.3 cm Pasadena, Norton Simon Foundation.

Degas

The Pont Valentré, Cahors Watercolour, 26 × 38 cm Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966.

Signac

Venice, or the Gondolas, 1908 Watercolour, 19 × 25 cm Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Michel Monet Bequest, 1966.

“Monet at home, in this house that is so modest and yet so sumptuous in its interior arrangements […]. The person who conceived and laid out this little world, at once magnificent and homely, is a great artist not only in the composition of his paintings, but also in the creation of this ‘design for living’ for his own pleasure…”

Writing in 1922, the writer and art critic Gustave Geffroy, Monet’s faithful friend and tireless champion of his work, underlined the significant role played in the artist’s life and work by the “little world” of Giverny.

Through this detailed exploration of the works that Monet chose to hang in his drawing room-studio and his bedroom at Giverny, Sylvie Patin, General Curator at the Musée d’Orsay and Corresponding Member of the Institut de France, invites us inside this “design for living” created by Monet himself. In these private spaces, he lived his daily life surrounded by the works of his friends, a distinguished group of outstanding artists including Boudin, Jongkind, Manet, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne and Signac. From this perceptive account there emerges a compelling portrait of the father of Impressionism, with all the generosity of his tastes, the warmth of his friendships, and the strength of his exceptional character.

978-2-35340-237-3

9 782353 402373

25 e

éditions Claude Monet Giverny