[Salle de lecture]

📜La salle de lecture des #Archives sera ouverte samedi 2 mai aux horaires habituels. (9h-12h, 14h-17h).

🌷Profitez-en pour visiter l'exposition "Jardins de papier", en libre accès, qui vous invite à plonger dans les archives administratives de #claudeMonet ainsi que dans la superbe série de #photographies de paysages réalisée par Claude Laporte.

Bonnes recherches et bonne visite !

#archiveseure #eure #eureennormandie

🌸 En écho à l'ouverture de notre nouvelle #exposition "Jardins de papier", nous vous partageons cette affiche conservée sous la cote 12Fi117 éditée à l'occasion de l'ouverture de la maison de #ClaudeMonet le 1er juin 1980. Il s'agit d'une affiche sur laquelle se trouve la reproduction des #nympheas offerte par #Eure Inter.

🎨 L'exposition "Jardins de papier : Claude Monet, Claude Laporte : Paysages eurois" ouverte depuis le 13 avril sera visible gratuitement aux Archives de l'Eure jusqu'au 3 juillet.

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"Water Lilies," Claude Monet, c. 1915.

Y'all know Monet. His water lily paintings occupied the last few decades of his life, all done in the garden of his home in Giverny. He was depressed after the deaths of his wife and son, but also was beginning to suffer from vision problems due to cataracts.

When he finally underwent cataract surgery in 1923, he destroyed some of his earlier work or retouched it; I have no idea if that's the case here. Still, it's a lovely image...the water lilies on the water's surface juxtaposed against the reflection of a willow tree. It's a gorgeous image that actually challenged some notions at the time; the idea of including the tree's reflection, but not the tree itself, was a bit daring.

Happy Flower Friday!

From the Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

#Art #ClaudeMonet #Impressionism #WaterLilies #FlowerFriday

Une dernière pour ce soir...

Quand on voit ces toiles « en vrai », elles nous surprennent toujours : leur taille, leur éclat... n’est pas toujours ce que l’on imaginait. Et la matière est bien là.

#Monet #ClaudeMonet #MuseeOrsay #Impressionnisme

Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet

Another of these rough impression paintings, maybe the one that gave the art movement its name ( https://authorherstorianparent.blogspot.com/2011/11/birth-of-impressionism-private-visions.html )

I appreciate the loose feel and color arrangement, the dark of the closer boats really pops but seems natural, the morning haze is lit by the sun. I think I'd want to pay half-price for this. Seems like a first draft. 🤣

#art #impressionism #color #harmony #sunrise #early #light #claudeMonet #boats

[baby-yoga]

Les #archives de l'Eure vous proposent en exclusivité des séances de #yoga "relaxation dans le jardin de #claudeMonet en lien avec notre prochaine exposition. Les séances sont animées par Jennifer Yazid, sophrologue et professeur de yoga et s'adressent aux enfants de 0 à 6 ans.

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”*…

… Still, there are bills to be paid. Mathilde Montpetit (and here) on how the young Claude Monet made bank…

At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre. Crowds would gather in the Norman port city to gawk at the pictures he sold through a framing shop: not paintings of haystacks or of the sea or water lilies, but slightly cruel caricatures of local bigwigs and minor celebrities. He had already learned to commercialize, charging his customers 20 francs (around 200€ in today’s money). “If I had continued”, he claimed to an interviewer in Le Temps almost fifty years later, “I would have been a millionaire.”

Spurred by profits, the young Monet was productive, creating up to seven or eight of these caricatures a day; a small collection of them is now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, most donated by the former mayor Carter Harrison IV (1860–1953). The French art historian Rodolphe Walter has claimed that his caricatures constituted a “clandestine apprenticeship”, the first attempts by a son of Le Havre’s bourgeois shipbuilders to make his way in the art world.

The earliest are anonymous: the identities of The Man in the Small Hat or The Man with the Big Cigar are now lost, although the framing shop devotees may well have been able to name them. Some of the works are imitations, like the 1859 drawing of the French journalist August Vacquerie (1819–1895) that Monet seems to have copied from Nadar (1820–1910), probably the period’s most famous caricaturist.

Monet’s own 1858 caricature of Léon Manchon, the treasurer of Le Havre’s Société des amis des arts, captures his subject’s appearance but also, in the background, both his love of the arts and his work as a notary. Most fantastical is the 1858 caricature of Jules Didier (1831–1914), which shows the 1857 winner of the Prix de Rome as a “Butterfly Man” being led on a leash by a dog. Monet scholars remain divided as to the symbolic meaning of the iconography, though more obviously derisive is the drawing of a dejected fellow applicant to an 1858 Le Havre art subsidy, Henri Cassinelli. Monet has captioned it “Rufus Croutinelli”: a slightly forced pun on “croute”, meaning a daub of paint. Monet didn’t receive the subsidy either.

Sixty-year-old Monet’s claims about how he could have made his young fortune probably had more to do with his later difficulties in selling Impressionism than the actual fortunes to be made in portraits-charge, but it was the roughly 2,000 francs (20,000€) from selling these caricatures that allowed him to, against his father’s wishes, move to Paris and begin training as an artist. (He also received a pension from his wealthy aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, with whom he had been living since his mother’s death in 1857.)

Perhaps it helped him in other ways as well. In the Le Temps interview, Monet claimed that it was while admiring his admirers at the framing shop window that he first encountered the work of his mentor Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), whose paintings were also hung there. Boudin would later take him en plein air for the first time. Perhaps, too, there’s something in the quickness of the caricature that speaks to what Impressionism would become — a desire to capture not just the literal appearance of a thing, but its true essence…

“Doing Impressions: Monet’s Early Caricatures (ca. late 1850s)” from @mathildegm.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.

Re: the other end of Monet’s career, readers in (or visiting) the Bay Area might appreciate “Monet and Venice,” over a hundred works– mostly the fruits of Monet’s only visit to the City of Canals, but spiced with Venetian views from artists including Renoir, Sargent, and Canaletto– on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 26.

* Kurt Vonnegut

###

As we cherish cartoons, we might might send pointedly-insightful birthday greetings to Peter Fluck; he was born on this date in 1941. An artist, caricaturist, and puppeteer, he was half of the partnership known as Luck and Flaw (with Roger Law), creators of the epochal British satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image.

The show ran from 1984 through 1996. (It was revived, with a different crew, in 2020.) Here’s a BBC appreciation of the original…

https://youtu.be/w_ks5Pb12kg?si=9a4LqrVO_CSnw-GF

Monet, Through The Iris

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/monet-through-the-iris