Claude Monet and Nature Essay

Van Gogh and Monet had both lived exceptionally different lives. Van Gogh did not start off wanting to become an artist, he was actually very interested in theology and had eventually become a minister. It had seemed as though Van Gogh had found his calling. Unfortunately, he was released from the church after his generosity had betrayed him. While trying to help miners, he gave away all of his clothes and was only left with a cloth. The church committee overseeing Van Gogh let him go because he did not dress or preach eloquently. This led to Van Gogh gaining an interest in art which would lead him to go to an art school in Paris to

By the time he was seventeen, Monet was already making money from his work and had won a local reputation as a caricaturist. Skillful and amusing, his caricatures were displayed in the window of a local frame maker, Monsieur Gravier, where they drew crowds of appreciative viewers. Gravier also displayed paintings by the landscape painter Eugene Boudin, who was an old friend of his. Monet's development of friendship and informal tutelage of Boudin proved to be formative for Monet's future direction as a landscape painter. (Gordon, 38)

Monet spent a great deal of his youth in Normandy, growing up in a suburb of Le Havre, where this view was painted. Even though this painting was completed very early in his career, Monet must have thought greatly of this piece, as he showed it in an exhibition held in Paris in 1876.

Claude was born in Paris, France in the year 1840. Despite the fact that Paris was his birthplace, Claude only spent 5 years of his childhood there as he and his family moved to Le Havre, a port town in Normandy. Claude developed a love for art in his early childhood and was well known in his town for drawing caricatures of his community members. His mother was highly encouraged his talent whereas Claude’s father wanted his son to become a businessman. Living in Le Havre, Claude had many opportunities to strengthen his talent such as meeting Eugene Boudin who was a local landscape artist and introduced Claude to landscape painting outdoors and set him on the track to his future success. In 1859 Claude moved back to Paris to pursue his career in art. During his time in Paris he was enrolled in the Academie Suisse and was influenced by the paintings of Barbizon School. Other great influences on his art were his friends Charles Gleyre, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille as well as Johann Barthold Jongkind who was a well-known landscape painter of the

Most Post-Impressionists worked in Paris. “Paris was considered to be the art capital of the world at that time. There was an intense concentration of artistic activity and art dealers in the city, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and academie Jlian were key schools where many artists were taught.” (Bolton 9) When he was alive he was a known artist but after he died he became famous. Some of his paintings was “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, “Bathers at Asnieres”, and “The Lighthouse at Honfleur.” But his most famous one is “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande

He often kept the subject to single person, demonstrating how many people lost loved ones or entire families in the preceding war. The facial expressions and settings for the paintings also properly depicted what the world was encountering: subjects were plain, settings were gloomy and tough. This was a depressed time and DuChamp used his art to show it. “Portrait of Gustave Candel’s Mother” is another painting where Duchamp shows how the wreckage of the war has affected the world, but specifically interprets this into one woman. Her face is dismal- she does not smile or cry, but she appears to be grim and unhappy. She is not young, perhaps showing how the war has ravaged humankind, even prematurely aging some of the people and forcing some to look older than they really were. And lastly, the woman’s portrait showing only her shoulders- no arms, torso, or legs, could symbolize the fact that world is not what it once was. People have half their strength (body) and even then, perhaps only embody part of themselves, having lost much of what they were prior to the

In the year of 1840 little did France, let alone the world, know that it was a year to be put in the history books. On this beautiful year a man of great recognition in the art world was born. The founding father of Impressionism, Claude Monet. He had been a painter of a new style. One of his paintings titled “Across the Meadow” was simply one of the art pieces among a multitude of other phenomenal impressionist works he had completed.

Andre Derain was born in a small town in Northern France called Chatou -- which at the time was an artists colony near Paris -- on Saturday, June 10, 1880. His dad was a successful pastry chef and town council member. As such, he received a middle class education, although it would appear he was unhappy as a student as he later stated “the teachers, ushers and pupils were a far more bitter memory for me than the darkest hours of my military career. ” At age 15 he began to take painting lessons from an old friend of his father and Paul Cezanne, La Noe.

He was a guy that raised and grew everything he almost ate. He had free ranged turkeys and chickens. It was crazy to find out that he was so into growing in his garden and raising these animals while being a very influential painter (Bordman & Fell 2015). They say he could connect with nature very well and therefore surround him with all of this food. Since Claude was able to connect with nature so well he was able to see beauty in things that others could not see. He was living in a pink house that had all of his gardens and plants around it that he loved so dearly. The garden behind his pink house almost looked like a painting in how he had it so welly organized with the families of food grouped together and the trees that apples that took a lot of space bordering the outside boundary of the yard (Bordman & Fell 2015). . This all comes to a surprise to me that he was so into gardening and painting, but like Meryl Sheep says that “Claude Monet was much more than an artist. Although he claimed to be good at only two of life's endeavours – painting and gardening – he lived a life that included entertaining leaders in art and politics in the large dining room of his beautiful home in the bucolic Normandy countryside.” This shows how he was a very unique guy that was in this world (Bordman & Fell 2015).

The Art Story Foundation (ASF) (2015) discusses Claude Monet (1840-1926) as one of the leaders of French Impressionism of the late nineteenth century. With Edouard Manet (1832-1883) as an inspiration, Monet developed his own distinctive style in the 1860s. He blurred the clarity of forms and linear perspective with bold colors emphasizing on qualities of light and atmosphere going against traditional artistic precision.

Matisse was born Henri-Emile-Benoit Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambresis, France on December 31, 1869 to his mother and father Anna Heloise Gerard and Emile Hippolyte Matisse. He was the first son of the couple. Matisse's father was a grain merchant and his mother made hats and painted China. He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for high school. In ways that area hadn't changed much since Roman times. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was dreamy, frail and

Paul Gauguin was a French artist who helped perfect a type of painting. First of all, Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin was born 1845 in Paris, France. When Paul was a young child his family moved to Peru. Paul later got jobs on a cargo ship, in the French navy, and as a merchant. He later married a Danish woman named Motte-Sophie Gad and had children. Next, Paul began painting as a hobby. Paul started painting as a hobby then became serious about it. He quit his job as a stockbroker and moved away from his family to pursue his dream. Paul was invited to showcase a painting in the Impressionist’s fourth exhibition. Last, Paul had a different type of style than other paintings. Paul used flat colors and exotic landscapes for his paintings like Tahiti.

Many of the artists under the impressionist era wanted the desire to paint the surroundings of trees and water with their true atmospheric surroundings. Monet was the first out of the impressionist artists to try painting out in nature because he wanted to paint the emotions of his mind given to him by what he sees to find out that no mixture of the pallet was able to reach such a feat only to lead to a dead nature. He kept on trying to perfect this style while others gave up and started to focus on their own styles. Monet eventually mastered this by depicting: brighter lighting, bluer shadows, and luminous skies (Fitzgerald 191-193). Monet was persistent on trying to perfect the depiction of natural lighting, he would be outside painting the Rouen cathedral where he would learn what colors to use and how the composition should be.

The subjects are directly related to the first paragraph. The main subjects of two paintings have several similarities and differences when it comes to a human theme and recognizable images. In Poussin’s painting, there is an emphasis on the ideals of classical Greek mythology. He referred to a story about an Athenian General, who had been convicted. This ties his work directly to human affairs. Poussin expressed the structure and daily life of ancient civilization in the landscape, carefully representing the norms of those times. In the same way, Monet’s painting also displays typical life. However, his portrayal occurs in a more modern era— the mid-19th century. It feels as though we are

As a result of the success of the Creuse Valley series, Monet developed his skills as a series painter devising a system for his innovative style. Still utilizing his impressionist roots, Monet took his art further by blending what he knew with this new and original expression. Monet began his series work in front of the subject, often working on several modest sized canvases simultaneously. The Art Gallery of New South Wales states, “…he would take several canvases to the same site each day, replacing a canvas whenever he noticed the light had altered. Groups of paintings with identical composition showed mutations in colour, tonality, and texture, evoking the passage of time.” [4] This series technique was a great way to intensely study subtle