Monet — Selected Works

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet — 1867

In the summer of 1867, Claude Monet stayed with his aunt at Sainte-Adresse, an affluent suburb of the port city Le Havre in northern France. The artist was familiar with the landscape, having grown up in the area, but the region changed significantly during his lifetime. The expansion of the country’s rail network turned this small, rural fishing village into a seaside resort for tourists. Here, Monet hinted at this transformation. The viewer is immediately drawn to the visible aspects of local life—dark-sailed fishing boats drift in the water, with groups of fishermen, their equipment, and other craft on the shore. The beached boats frame two figures sitting on the shoreline, highlighted by a few strokes of red and yellow paint: a man in a dark hat and suit looks through a telescope, accompanied by a woman wearing a straw hat with a scarlet ribbon. The presence of this couple—undoubtedly vacationers, given their fashionable attire—changes what might have been a traditional coastal scene into a painting of modern life, one of the artist’s first explorations of tourism. Monet began this painting outdoors and revised it later in his studio. Conservation research has revealed that he changed his mind about the composition while he worked: he initially included other tourist figures and yachts in the scene but later painted over these details, shifting his focus to the fishermen, the aspect of life in Sainte-Adresse that he knew best. Monet’s seascapes from this summer are markedly different from those painted only a few years earlier, and Beach at Sainte-Adresse exemplifies his evolving painting technique. It also foreshadows some of the qualities that became characteristic of the Impressionist movement, which is perhaps why Monet chose to show it at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, nearly ten years after he painted it. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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The Red Kerchief

Claude Monet — 1868

This painting depicts Monet's first wife, Camille, outside on a snowy day passing by the French doors of their home at Argenteuil. Her face is rendered in a radically bold Impressionist technique of mere daubs of paint quickly applied, just as the snow and trees are defined by broad, broken strokes of pure white and green.

Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 · Source image ↗

On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt

Claude Monet — 1868

Here Claude Monet’s future wife, Camille Doncieux, sits on an island in the Seine River, looking toward the hamlet of Gloton, next to the town of Bennecourt, from which she and Monet have presumably rowed. This is the only painting to survive from the brief period that the couple spent in Gloton, which the novelist Émile Zola recommended to Monet as a cheap rural retreat that was easily accessible from Paris. Pentimenti (visible traces of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint) suggest that in an early stage of the painting, Camille held a bonneted child, presumably the couple’s baby, Jean. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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The Artist's House at Argenteuil

Claude Monet — 1873

Claude Monet and his family lived at Argenteuil, outside Paris, from 1871 to 1878. Here he depicted his five- or six-year-old son, Jean, playing with a hoop and his wife, Camille, standing in the doorway of their vine-covered house. The pleasant weather and neatly kept garden, a forerunner of the artist’s celebrated garden at Giverny, give a sense of tranquility and well-being to this painting. This was a period of financial security for Monet thanks to recent sales of his work to the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet — 1877

One of the most avant-garde aspects of the Impressionists was their choice of subject matter, which frequently included scenes derived from modern, industrial Paris, from iron bridges to exhibition halls to train sheds. The train station at Saint-Lazare would have been a familiar, meaningful sight to Claude Monet in the 1870s. The terminal linked Paris to Normandy, where the artist developed his technique of painting outdoors in the 1860s. It was also the point of departure for the towns and villages west and north of Paris that the Impressionists frequently visited. Monet completed eight of his twelve known paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in time for the third Impressionist exhibition, in 1877, probably displaying them in the same gallery. Monet chose to focus his attention here on the glass-and-iron train shed, where he found an appealing combination of artifi cial and natural effects—the rising steam of locomotives trapped within the structure and the daylight penetrating large, glazed sections of the roof, for instance. Monet’s depictions of the station inaugurated what was to become for him an established pattern of painting a specific motif repeatedly in order to capture subtle and temporal atmospheric changes, as in his famous series of stacks of wheat . But the Saint-Lazare paintings also represented his last attempt to capture urban life: from this point on in his career, Monet largely devoted himself to landscapes. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Apples and Grapes

Claude Monet — 1880

Claude Monet probably painted this and other still lifes in 1879–80, knowing that they would be more readily marketable than his landscapes. In Apples and Grapes , however, he employed the complexity of color, light, and texture found in his most Impressionist landscapes. This is particularly evident in the extensive cloth surface—the play of light on the horizontal brushstrokes (indicating the folds in the tablecloth) recalls earlier canvases in which Monet used similar short horizontals of variegated colors to suggest water rippling in the sunlight. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Cliff Walk at Pourville

Claude Monet — 1882

In February 1882, Claude Monet went to Normandy to paint, one of many such expeditions that he made in the 1880s. This was also a retreat from personal and professional pressures. His wife, Camille, had died three years earlier, and Monet had entered into a domestic arrangement with Alice Hoschedé (whom he would marry in 1892, after her husband's death). France was in the midst of a lengthy economic recession that affected Monet's sales. In addition, the artist was unenthusiastic about the upcoming seventh Impressionist exhibition—divisions within the group had become pronounced by this time—and he delegated the responsibility for his contribution to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Disappointed in the area around the harbor city of Dieppe, which he found too urban, Monet settled in Pourville and remained in this fishing village until mid-April. He became increasingly enamored of his surroundings, writing to Hoschedé and her children: "How beautiful the countryside is becoming, and what joy it would be for me to show you all its delightful nooks and crannies!" He was able to do so in June, when they joined him in Pourville.The two young women strolling in Cliff Walk at Pourville are probably Marthe and Blanche, the eldest Hoschedé daughters. In this work, Monet addressed the problem of inserting figures into a landscape without disrupting the unity of its painterly surface. He integrated these elements with one another through texture and color. The grass—composed of short, brisk, curved brushstrokes—appears to quiver in the breeze, and subtly modified versions of the same strokes and hues suggest the women's wind-whipped dresses and shawls and the undulation of the sea. X-radiographs show that Monet reduced the rocky outcropping at the far right to balance the proportions of sea and sky. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Bordighera

Claude Monet — 1884

Early in 1884 Claude Monet traveled to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera near the border between Italy and France, for a working visit of three weeks that turned into nearly three months. In a letter to sculptor Auguste Rodin describing his efforts to capture the brilliant Mediterranean light, Monet declared that he was “fencing, wrestling, with the sun.” In other letters he complained of the impossibility of finding a suitable subject amid the region’s abundant vegetation. In this sun-drenched composition painted from a hilltop vantage point, the sea is barely visible through the interlaced trunks of local pine trees. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)

Claude Monet — 1890

The monumental stacks that Claude Monet depicted in his series Stacks of Wheat rose fifteen to twenty feet and stood just outside the artist’s farmhouse at Giverny. Through 1890 and 1891, he worked on this series both in the field, painting simultaneously at several easels, and in the studio, refining pictorial harmonies. In May 1891, Monet hung fifteen of these canvases next to each other in one small room in the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. An unprecedented critical and financial success, the exhibition marked a breakthrough in Monet’s career, as well as in the history of French art. In this view, and in nearly all of the autumn views in the series, the conical tops of the stacks break the horizon and push into the sky. But in most of the winter views, which constitute the core of the series, the stacks seem wrapped by bands of hill and field, as if bedded down for the season. For Monet, the stack was a resonant symbol of sustenance and survival. He followed this group with further series depicting poplars, the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and, later, his own garden at Giverny. The Art Institute has the largest group of Monet’s Stacks of Wheat in the world. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Poppy Field (Giverny)

Claude Monet — 1890

In July 1890, Claude Monet began four almost identically scaled canvases showing poppy fields near his home in Giverny. Although he did not consider these to be a series, like the 25 paintings of stacks of wheat that he began shortly after the harvest that same summer, the works certainly show his growing interest in developing several canvases at once. They also demonstrate a far more homogeneous touch than the freely brushed landscapes of his earlier career, with surfaces that have a tapestry-like materiality. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Branch of the Seine near Giverny (Mist)

Claude Monet — 1897

This placid landscape is the result of an energetic creative process. For months Claude Monet rose before dawn to travel by rowboat to the same location on the river Seine, where he painted 14 canvases simultaneously, reworking them as the light shifted. Although this painting appears hazy and vague, Monet made deliberate technical decisions—for instance, blurring a once-distinct horizon line with vigorously blended brushstrokes that grow looser as they radiate outward. Monet custom-ordered the nearly square canvas, an unusual shape that contributes to the disorienting nature of the scene, half of which represents a reflection on the water. By diffusing the landscape through these techniques, Monet attempted to capture the transience of light and mist, a theme he pursued throughout his career. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Water Lily Pond

Claude Monet — 1900

In 1893, three years after buying property at Giverny, Claude Monet began transforming the marshy ground behind his home into a pond, on the narrow end of which he built a Japanese-style wood bridge. Adding both exotic and domestic plantings, including his famous water lilies, the artist created the garden that would be one of his principal subjects for the rest of his life. Water Lily Pond was among the 18 similar versions of the motif that he made in 1899–1900; their common theme was the mingling of the lilies with reflections of other vegetation on the pool’s surface. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Houses of Parliament, London

Claude Monet — 1900

During his London campaigns, Claude Monet painted the Houses of Parliament in the late afternoon and at sunset from a terrace at Saint Thomas’s Hospital. This viewpoint was close to that of the English artist J. M. W. Turner in his visionary paintings of the fire that had destroyed much of the old Parliament complex in 1834. In his response to the poetry of dusk and mist, however, Monet was actually inspired by the work of a more recent painter of the Thames, the American James McNeill Whistler. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Water Lilies

Claude Monet — 1906

Little did Claude Monet know that the water garden he created three years after buying his Giverny, France, property in 1890 would become his primary inspiration over the next two and a half decades. These paintings, numbering around 250, mark Monet’s artistic journey from more straightforward depictions of the pond spanned by the wooden Japanese bridge to the monumental and near-abstract series on the water lily theme he made in preparation for his murals at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris between 1914 and 1926. Water Lilies , one of a group of paintings on the subject made between 1903 and 1908, comes at the midpoint of Monet’s developing style and spatial experimentations. The nearly square format underscores his move away from painting the conventional zones of land, sky, and water to focus solely on the water’s surface. Clusters of water lilies at bottom left and top right frame a watery path, while the water’s surface reflects trees and clouds. Although the dreamlike quality of floating forms might seem to be a natural development for the artist, he considered these works “an obsession,” a sentiment borne out by technical examinations on the Art Institute’s canvas, revealing many significant changes made to the painting in progress. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Water Lilies (Agapanthus)

Claude Monet — 1915

A skilled horticulturalist as well as an artist, Claude Monet spent the last 30 years of his life painting the private garden he designed and helped cultivate at his home in Giverny in northern France. The resultant canvases are notable for their varied motifs, formats, and sizes. Monumental in scale, this rendering of his water lily pond focuses on the momentary effects of sunlight as it both penetrates and reflects off its shimmering surface. By zeroing in on the water and omitting its horizon and surrounding banks, Monet infers a limitless expanse—a perception amplified by the painting’s vast horizontal format that fills the viewer’s field of vision.

Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 · Source image ↗