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Light and Colours
By peace | September 17, 2010
Impression, Sunrise, 1872 by Claude Monet
Have you ever noticed the way colours change according to the light: That of a house, for instance, looks quite different in the cool light of dawn than it does in the warm evening light of the setting sun? Or how different it looks on a gray day compared to bright sunlight? It was these impressions that Monet wanted to paint: The Sparkle of Light; the interplay between sun and shadow; dancing colours.
Impression: Sunrise (1872) or the painting above is one of Monet’s most famous pictures. It shows the harbour at Le Havre. What the artist found most important was to capture the reflections of the sunlight and to portray the morning mist. The short brushstrokes make the light seem to flicker. It was after the title of this painting, “Impression”, that Monet and his painter friends came to be known as Impressionists. At first the word was not meant nicely, but today Impressionism refers to a movement in art.
Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) preferred to paint outside. That meant that he could always study the countryside, people, and things in the constantly changing light. Monet was not interested in what colour things really were or the material they were made of. He wanted to record the fleeting impression of a particular moment.
When he was still young, Monet became one of the founders of Impressionism. Impressionism is a style of painting which arose in France between 1860 and 1870 and which had a strong influence on painting in both Europe and America. The name refers to the painting Impression by Claude Monet. The Impressionists aimed to show the visual impression the scene made on them by means of shimmering dots of light and colour. The Impressionists especially liked working outdoors because it is outside that the light conditions and colours change most noticeably depending on the time of day and the season. Late Impressionism began in about 1880, when painters like Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin became less and less interested in painting the world as it really is.
Many years were to pass, however, before the general public started to like Impressionist painting — years during which Monet and his family lived in poverty and had to put up with a great deal of mockery from the art critics. Later, however, he emerged as one of the most famous artists in Paris and became extremely rich.
In 1890 Monet bought a house in the village of Giverny near Paris where he lived with his family. It had a large garden which Monet planted with lots of flowers and blossoming shrubs in bright colour combinations. Most important of all, he had a humongous pond dug, planted it with water lilies, and had a Japanese-style bridge built across it. That meant that he could watch teh wonderful play of colour and light which he needed for his paintings just by stepping outside his front door. Even when he was old and almost blind, Monet sat outdoors and painted impressions of his garden.
After Monet’s death his step-daughter Blanche continued to look after the garden. Later it became more and more neglected, but was then carefully restored during the 1970s. Today you can admire Monet’s house and garden with the water-lily pond in all its glory in the village of Giverny, about 70km (44 miles) north of Paris.
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