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Claude Monet

No artist is more fully associated with the Impression than Claude Monet (1840-1926). He began to paint rapidly executed, gestural paintings by the mid-1860s and took out-of-door, direct painting to new heights in 1868-69 with such works as Bathers at La Grenouillère. Unlike earlier Impressions, where Monet had segregated color areas in carefully composed patterns, here he covered the surface of the canvas with hundreds of individual touches of paint and scattered color everywhere. Monet completely dissolved the distinction between figure and ground, describing each with paint strokes of equal thickness and directional power. This energy is present in other paintings by Monet in this exhibition, which feature such diverse subjects as figures on a beach, seascapes, the bridges of Argenteuil, and train stations.

Like his colleague Renoir, Monet mastered this kind of painting early in his career but favored reworking his canvases from the 1880s onward. Monet came to understand that rapid painting did not necessarily mean entrapping nature's fleeting effects. An apparent desire for an objective painting of light led him away from the personal and psychologically expressive kind of painting associated with the Impression.