Monet's Art: A Searchable Database
Red Boats, Argenteuil
55 x 65 cm
1875
Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
To the average museum-goer the paintings of Monet are now so familiar and so reassuring that it is easy to forget they enraged the critics and public. The experience of light, at times becoming almost the subject itself, was greatly enhanced, but so was the physical, material reality of the painted surface. The conseguence was that paintings became more "paintings" and less images. These two fundamental realities, the physical reality of the painting and the implied reality of the image, co-existed in charged tension as never been achieved before. The very act of seeing, rather than the obects seen, took on an importance which revolutionized representative painting.
It may also be a surprise that not until Monet's generation was landscape painting appreciated as a complex, challenging, and spiritually fulfilling form of art. And Monet did more than anyone to change attitudes about landscape painting. In fact, wide-scale art patronage began much later in France than in Italy, it was 1648 when the State Academy of Fine Arts was founded to educate and support native artists whose eventual accomplishments would reflect the high cultural ideals of the rule of Louis XIV. Modeled on the venerable traditions of court art in Florence and Rome, the Academy encouraged artists to represent the highest human virtues recorded in ancient literature and history. Such idealized or allegorical subjects, which sought to portray abstract truths rahter than existing realities, were considered to be the greatest test of an artists genius. Painters who were content to depicteverday life were taken less seriously.Monet broke this tradtion more completely than any other painter developing skills to record the unique appearances of fleeting moments more powerfully than any camera in the last century could do. Only after considerable hardship, he won fame and fortune.
Monet exemplifies Impressionism more completely and pushed it further than any other painter. The movement's radicalism lay in its declared determination to paint not just reality but the seeing of reality, the act of perception itself, by showing how light, in its various intensities, tended to dissolve the colors and forms of the world. The technical key to this effect lay in spontaneous, broken, skipping brushwork and the abandoning of the low-key tradition palette where earth colors and subtle shades of grays dominated — preferably registered in paint applied in front of the subject, en plein air.
Cézanne’s famous summing up is still the best: Monet, he said, “is only an eye, but good God, what an eye.” The phrase, frequently quoted without the God part, has often been taken as a subtle criticism that implies a reflexive skill, dispassionate and even cold.
In approximately eight decades, Monet worked obsessively building one of the largest oeuvres of 18th c. painting. According to the authoritative five-volume catalogue raisonne (1974-91), Daniel Wildenstein has listed a few more than 2,050 paintings. This number was surely larger since is well known that Monet destroyed many of his his own works and that a number have been inevitably lost over time.
One of the goals of this website is to create an ONLINE DATABASE OF THE WORK OF CLAUDE MONET so that the average navigator can delight and inform himself as completely as possible of the magnificent ouevre of Monet. However, the principle objective of this initiative is to become a springboard to visit to the real works which are housed in public musums and private collections all over the world since even the best digital images can only be indicitive and no way rival the beauty and significance of a real painting. Every effort possible has been made to present as many works as possible with acceptable digital images.
In such an undertaking, your cooperation will be gladly welcomed either in signaling new woks or erroneous information. The copyright of all the images in this website belong soley to the owners of the paintings and may not be used. Please click here to access complete copyright and discalimer information. This site is neither commissioned nor endorsed by the owners of the paintings.
At present, 600 paintings may now be researched by subject, place and decade.