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Art Analysis Of Claude Monet's The Sea At Le Havre

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The Sea at Le Havre, painted by Claude Monet in 1868, is a 23 5/8” x 24 3/8” oil on canvas landscape painting. Monet was a French artist who lived from 1840 to 1926 and was considered to be an impressionist. A unique quality of Monet was unblended “sloppy” brushstrokes combined with a use of precise choice of color, as seen clearly in The Sea at Le Havre. Because of his vigorous and richly textured painting style, Monet was able to capture the look and feel of the movement of water, which was demonstrated in The Sea at Le Havre, using an impasto style. He used erratic brushstrokes to show the ripples of forming waves and the foam of the waves crashing on the shore. His brushstrokes are also almost completely horizontal, which seemed to make the painting feel heavier. In the sky, Monet used thicker, longer, and more opaque strokes, as well as of varying hues of blue and gray, along with white, to create a look of overcast. To give the clouds fluffiness and substance, the paint that was used for the sky was inconspicuously smudged in some places, with more defined clouds layered overtop. The depth of the painting is attributed to his choices of color. Black is rarely used in the painting aside from where necessary, but rather replaced with darker shades of blue to show divots in the water, heavy clouds, and the distance of the village of houses that line the horizon. The different shades also give a more realistic form of light to his paintings, which was a focus of the impressionism era. His painting appears to be slightly gloomy, but doesn’t convey sadness. The piece is uniform in color, to emphasize the overcast, darkened day. Monet also used symmetrical spacing, with the canvas split nearly in half between the sea and the sky. The only thing that separates the sea and the sky is a piece of jutted-out land that shows he is on a gulf or an inlet. On that piece of land, that goes a little over a third of the way onto the canvas, Monet used heavy contrast, then continues the horizon with a slightly thick, darker blue-gray line to clearly separate the halves of sea and sky. There are three places where it appears that Monet used black along with darker shades of purple and blue, and each of those three places are

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