Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (11 page)

The technical procedures of the Impressionists varied from painter to painter, and in most cases they evolved over the decades. But their “strange language” involved, among other things, conspicuously calling attention to their brushes and their paints. They fragmented their brushstrokes into flickering touches of color that seemed to dissolve their painted worlds into shimmering mirages. Most critics and gallery-goers were taken aback by these apparently slipshod and incoherent dashes and commas, which were so different in application from the smooth and precise touches of established and successful painters, such as Meissonier, whose meticulous attention to minute detail was savored by one collector through the lens of a magnifying glass. Impressionist canvases were not meant to be seen at such close range. In 1873 a young critic named Marie-Amélie Chartroule de Montifaud, who wrote under the pseudonym Marc de Montifaud, noted that the apparently “crude simplicity” of a Manet painting actually disguised a sophisticated visual experience. “Stand back a little,” she urged in her review. “Relations between masses of color begin to be established. Each part falls into place, and each detail becomes exact.”
²¹
The ideal viewing distance for Impressionist paintings soon became a topic of scientific discussion. Camille Pissarro—who by the 1880s had hoped to use “methods based on science” in his art—eventually came up with a formula whereby the viewer should stand at a distance measured at three times the diagonal of the canvas.
²²

Paradoxically for a painter who wished to give the impression of spontaneity, Monet’s painting technique actually required a good deal of forethought and groundwork. His supposedly impulsive canvases were actually the result of much advance preparation and fastidious organization. A visitor to his studio once counted seventy-five paintbrushes and forty boxes of pigments.
²³
Each of his canvases—which arrived regularly on the train from Paris—was first of all primed with a layer of lead white, giving a luminous ground for the layers of bright color that he would then apply. One of the innovations of Édouard Manet and the Impressionists in the 1860s had been this pale, luminous base layer on which they worked. Their technique broke all of the artistic rules established by the “serious school,” since artists had always painted over top of a darker ground in order to enhance the appearance of depth. Titian and Tintoretto, for example, had used brown or dark red undercoats, and even Gustave Courbet—a good friend of Monet’s and an early influence on him—sometimes painted over a black primer coat. But the Impressionists in their quest for an airy brightness abandoned not only these dark bases but also the bitumen-based glazes with which so many of their predecessors had slathered the tops of their painted canvases in order to achieve a darkish Old Master patina. As a connoisseur once informed John Constable: “A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.”
²⁴
Many color merchants even stocked for use by painters the same amber glaze with which instrument makers varnished their lutes.

Those who prized the well-varnished Old Master look were highly suspicious of colorful pyrotechnics. The nineteenth-century art theorist Charles Blanc once declared that painting “will fall through color just as mankind fell through Eve.”
²⁵
But the Impressionists had been only too happy to be seduced by the bright new colors that nineteenth-century chemistry was creating. Early in his career, Monet had captured the sparkling effects of sunlit water on the Thames thanks to a palette that included cobalt violet, invented in 1859, and chromium oxide green, created in 1862.

Monet was also anxious to use pigments that would survive the test of time—ones that would not fade or yellow, as he knew so many
pigments were prone to doing. According to an art dealer, Monet was always thinking about “the chemical evolution of colors” as he painted.
²⁶
By the time he resumed work in the spring of 1914, his palette of colors had therefore been narrowed to those pigments he believed to be the most stable. In order to enhance their preservation, he also mixed them much less than he had done in the 1860s and 1870s. Moreover, he took to squeezing his pigments onto absorbent paper to extract some of the poppy oil binder, since he knew that oils, as they rose to the surface, were responsible for the yellowing of many Old Masters—a murky posterity from which he hoped his paintings would be spared.

BY JUNE, MONET
was working so intently on his work that only with the greatest difficulty could he be persuaded to leave Giverny. He even turned down an invitation to Jumièges to supervise the garden he had designed at Les Zoaques. Only the most momentous occasion—the entrance of fourteen of his paintings into the Louvre—convinced him to take the train to Paris. The honor was truly magnificent. Artists ordinarily needed to have been dead for at least ten years before their works could be displayed in the Louvre. Monet would therefore be one of a very few living artists ever to see his work hung in what one of France’s most eminent curators called “that great Pantheon of Art.”
²⁷

Monet disliked crowds, traveling, public events and even Paris itself. He described himself, with good reason, as a
casanier
—a homebody.
²⁸
“City life doesn’t really suit me,” he once claimed.
²⁹
Unlike Manet and Degas, he preferred the country lanes of Normandy to the boulevards of Paris. A decade earlier a journalist noted that Monet’s celebrity was one of the things that made Paris odious to him: he was unable to walk a hundred yards “without being accosted by importuners, boors, pretentious ignoramuses and snobs.”
³⁰

Monet did, however, make regular trips to Paris. One thing that could always entice him was the prospect of eating oysters with friends at the restaurant Prunier in the rue Duphot—the most fashionable seafood restaurant in Paris—as well as going to wrestling matches. “The effort is always a beautiful thing,” he said of wrestling.
³¹
His visits to Paris
did not fail to cause a stir. A friend once visited the theater with him and Geffroy. “I remember walking beside Claude Monet, squat, solid and quiet, as he struck his cane vigorously on the pavement. He had the appearance of a proud and free
campagnard
on a boulevard.” Inside the theater, packed with “brilliantly shallow” Parisians, such was his compelling presence and forceful charisma that all eyes turned to him. “When he took his seat, the ushers, without being able to name this powerful figure, had the confused sensation that a true man had just entered the box.”
³²

At first Monet used his work as a convenient excuse to avoid the throng of the grand opening:
Gil Blas
reported that he could not attend because he was “in the middle of working and could not leave the motif.”
³³
The sight of his paintings adorning the walls of the Louvre was, however, far too seductive to pass up. Moreover, spurned for many years by the artistic establishment, Monet had long been determined that he and his friends and allies should be conspicuously represented in the national collections. In 1890 he had waged a long and vigorous campaign to get Manet’s
Olympia
—the scandal of the 1865 Paris Salon—into the Luxembourg Museum, Paris’s museum of contemporary art. In 1907 he convinced Clemenceau, then the prime minister, to move the painting into the Louvre for its ultimate consecration. Seven years later, he was about to join Manet in the Louvre.

Monet did therefore make one of his rare forays into Paris, where a curator at the Louvre arranged a private viewing of the Camondo rooms.
³⁴
In early June, he boarded the train at Bonnières-sur-Seine, five miles from his house. The journey on the Paris–Le Havre line took a little more than an hour, but the route of the chugging train would have plunged Monet back into his vanishing past. His life had run parallel, so to speak, to this railway line, which stretched from the Gare Saint-Lazare to the Normandy coast. The first rails had been laid in 1841, one year after his birth, and the line reached Le Havre, his childhood home, in 1847, a year or two after his family relocated there from Paris. This had been the railway line that had transported him, in May 1859, aged eighteen, along its 140 miles of track to study in Paris, and then carried
him back to Normandy many times to paint at Rouen, Sainte-Adresse, Honfleur, and Trouville-sur-Mer.

On that June day in 1914 Monet caught the train from the Paris-bound platform at Bonnières. The locomotive traveled east, taking him on what must have been a fond, familiar, and at times, poignant journey. It went through the valley of the Seine and into Paris’s western suburbs—into the heartland of Impressionism, whose twin arteries, for Monet, were the river and the railway, with their splendid, colorful paraphernalia of rowboats and cafés, bridges and bathers, and locomotives releasing their black plumage into the sky. “Impressionism was born,” a critic would write more than a dozen years later, “in the suburbs of the capital.”
³⁵
No one had loved this landscape of suburbs and villages, of pleasure spots and happy exertions, of dappled sunlight and reflections on wrinkled surfaces of water, more than Monet, or depicted it so distinctly and enticingly.

From Bonnières the railway swung south across the meadows, avoiding a meander in the Seine, and after passing through a two-thousand-yard-long tunnel emerged at Rosny-sur-Seine, where flashes of river could be seen through dense riverbank foliage. A few minutes later came Mantes-la-Jolie and a glimpse of its old stone bridge, once painted by Camille Corot, whom Monet called “the greatest landscape painter” of all.
³⁶
Twenty minutes later, on the opposite side of the river, the white limekilns of Triel-sur-Seine appeared. High above them, screened by a green cloister of poplars, stood the villa of Monet’s friend Octave Mirbeau. A few minutes later, rattling through Médan, Monet could have seen the house of another writer and friend of the Impressionists, the late Émile Zola, its shutters and towers visible above the trees on the right. Next came Poissy—“that horrible place,” as Monet called it
³⁷
—where he had lived briefly before moving to Giverny and where, uniquely, he found nothing to paint.

The locomotive then puffed through the Forest of Saint-Germainen-Laye and crossed the looping Seine. Downstream to the right, as the train clattered through Carrières, were the islands, cafés, and other landmarks that almost a century later the local municipalities would
shrewdly christen the “Pays des Impressionnistes”—the Land of the Impressionists. The Restaurant Fournaise, immortalized in 1881 by Renoir in
The Luncheon of the Boating Party
, had closed its doors almost a decade earlier, but farther downstream the boatyard, café, and ballroom of La Grenouillère, “the Frog Pond,” were still operating. Here Monet and Renoir had painted side by side on the riverbank in the summer of 1869, capturing bathers bobbing in the river and reflections quivering around the tiny island known as Le Camembert.

To the left, three miles upstream from the bridge, where the breadth of the Seine expanded to two hundred yards, the masts and smokestacks of Argenteuil appeared. Here, newly married, Monet had lived from 1871 to 1874 in the rue Pierre Guienne, and then for the next four years in the boulevard Saint-Denis (later renamed, in honor of a subsequent Argenteuil resident, boulevard Karl Marx). Here he used to paint Camille in their garden, against spectacular profusions of flowers. Other times he carried his canvases and easel down to the riverbank or onto the highway bridge and painted sailboats, the railway bridge, the port of Argenteuil. Or he plied the broad stretch of river in his floating studio, a rowboat onto which, with the help of his friend, the painter Gustave Caillebotte, he constructed a makeshift cabin. As water sloshed against the hull and Camille sat inside the cabin, he would sit cross-legged on the foredeck, happily painting—which was precisely how, one golden day in the summer of 1874, Édouard Manet depicted him at work. Manet also painted him tending his garden in the rue Pierre Guienne, bent over his flowers with Camille and seven-year-old Jean reposing nearby on the lawn. “Those wonderful moments,” Monet later remembered of that time, “with their illusions, their enthusiasm, their fervor, ought never to end.”
³⁸

The train crossed the Seine for the last time at Asnières, upstream from the Île de la Grande Jatte, on the bridge that thirty years earlier Georges Seurat depicted in the background of
Bathers at Asnières
. To the left, once this bridge was crossed, lay the scrubby patch of ground that a century later another local municipality, equally shrewd, would christen “Le Parc des Impressionnistes.” Then Paris finally hove into view, the Arc de Triomphe visible in the distance and, beyond it, the
Eiffel Tower. The train passed the smokestacks and gasholders of Clichy and immediately entered the Batignolles, where Monet and his friends had once gathered each night at their table in the Café Guerbois to discuss “art with a capital A”
³⁹
and plan their conquest of Paris. The café stood close to Manet’s studio, the interior of which had been depicted in 1870 by Henri Fantin-Latour in
A Studio at Les Batignolles
, featuring Monet and his friends grouped about the elegant, blue-cravatted Manet as he sat at his easel. Fantin-Latour had now been dead for a decade, and of the eight determined young men he portrayed, only Monet and Renoir survived.