CLAUDE MONET

(1840-1926)

La Seine près de Giverny

Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming Claude Monet Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

Provenance
Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris (acquired from the artist on April 2, 1891).
Henry Sayles Collection, Boston (acquired from the above on August 31, 1891).
Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York (acquired from the above on April 8, 1892).
Bertha and Potter Palmer Collection, Chicago (acquired from the above on June 13, 1892); their Estate sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries Inc., New York, March 16, 1944, lot 75.
Gustave Schindler Collection, New York (acquired at the above sale).
Tannenbaum Galleries, New York.
Cecile Bemtgen Beer Collection, New York; her Estate sale, Sotheby Parke-Bernet Inc., New York, November 1, 1978, lot 15.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited
Boston, Saint Botolph Club, An Exhibition of Paintings by Claude Monet, March 28 – April 9, 1892, no. 4.

Literature
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. III, 1887-1898, Peintures, Geneva, 1979, no. 1211 (illustrated p. 117).
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Catalogue raisonné, vol. V, Supplément aux peintures, dessins, pastels, index, Lausanne, 1991, no. 1211.
D. Wildenstein, Monet: Catalogue raisonné, vol. III, Cologne, 1996, no. 1211 (illustrated p. 461).



On January 12, 1888, Claude Monet boarded an overnight train from Paris and headed south for the Mediterranean. His aim was both to escape the northern winter and find a fresh landscape for depiction. His destination was the Cap d'Antibes peninsula, where he was to stay in an erstwhile manor house, the Château de la Pinède, which had recently been converted into a painters' retreat. The sojourn didn't start particularly auspiciously: heavy rain made it difficult for Monet to visit the surrounding area, let alone paint it, and he also found disagreeable the presence in his lodgings of a cohort of students accompanying the painter, Henri-Joseph Harpignies.

The subsequent months proved to be a mix of highs and lows. The former included the execution of a host of successful paintings of the picturesque Côte d'Azur town of Antibes, captured from different vantage points. However, as he set out in a series of letters to his partner, Alice, who had remained behind at their home in Giverny, Monet was struggling greatly with his creative process.

On February 11, he wrote: "I really don't know how to make headway with a painting any more. I feel as if I were doing the same thing every day without getting anywhere... I assure you, I worry that I'm finished, used up" (quoted in D. Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1996, p.238).

Monet's travails persisted in the weeks and months ahead, a sense of which can be discerned from the following excerpts from three further letters to Alice. On March 16: "Hard as I work, I can't finish anything; there are only pictures I can't do anything more with." On March 25: "I haven't been able to paint! You can imagine how it torments me... I'm so angry." On April 10: "I thought things were going better... I've never had such problems" (quoted in ibid., pp.238-239).

All the while, Monet was in the midst of heated disagreements with his dealers in Paris, insistent that his work was not being sold for the right prices. A particular source of his dissatisfaction was Georges Petit, whom Monet also accused of withholding payments. The artist was unhappy, additionally, with the dealer's cancellation of an upcoming group exhibition at his gallery, which had been set to include a number of Monet's works. "Really, how vile this has all been," he said of the cancellation, in another letter to Alice from the Cap d'Antibes (quoted in ibid., p.240).

It was surely with relief that Monet returned to his partner and family in Giverny at the start of May 1888, and it is in in such a context that La Seine près de Giverny should be considered. This exuberant, brightly colored scene marked a happy homecoming for the artist after the stresses and struggles he had experienced while in the south of France. It depicts the River Seine as it flowed near the Monets' rural home, forty-five miles northwest of Paris.

The river is tranquil and full, the weather sunny, and it appears to be around the middle of the day in late spring or early summer. Not a single human is in sight – just a turquoise sky with a smattering of rose-tinted clouds, beneath which various trees can be seen with thick, fresh foliage in red and green. The trees occupy the opposite bank of the river, and their reflection in the slightly rippling water in the foreground takes up almost half the picture. The hills of Porte-Villez can be seen in the distance on the right.

Apart from a brief stint in London in 1870-1 while the Franco-Prussian War took place in his homeland, Monet lived by the Seine his entire life. He was born in Paris in 1840 and moved with his family at the age of five to Le Havre, the port city in Normandy where the river in question flows into the Atlantic. In his late teens, he returned to the French capital and entered the atelier of Charles Gleyre, where he befriended fellow students, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. It was alongside this duo that he helped launch the Impressionist movement in the early 1870s. Monet was living at that time in Argenteuil, a scenic Seine-side town on the outskirts of western Paris which proved a beacon to many Impressionists.

After six years in Argenteuil, Monet – broadly speaking – followed the Seine ever north-westward, making a home in spots which have become famous because of his connection with them: Vétheuil, Poissy and, finally, in 1883, Giverny. Back then, Giverny was a tiny farming community of just 300 inhabitants, and it would remain Monet's home until his death in 1926. Upon arriving there, the artist rented a pink stucco house called Le Pressoir on two-and-a-half acres of land – with sufficient space to accommodate himself, Alice and their combined brood of eight children (from their respective marriages earlier in life). Le Pressoir came complete with a barn which he converted into a studio.

Monet was instantly captivated by the landscape around Giverny. "Once settled, I hope to produce masterpieces, because I like the countryside very much," he wrote to the Paris-based dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, within days of his arrival (quoted in Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., New York, 1978, pp. 15-16). He didn't think twice about purchasing Le Pressoir when it came up for sale in 1890. Not long afterwards, he told Durand-Ruel in another letter that he was "certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside" than that in Giverny (quoted in P. Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 175).

He reveled in the pictorial potential of the local terrain. In the mid-1880s, setting out with his canvases each day at dawn, he produced a remarkably diverse corpus of landscapes: painting on a hill overlooking his house, in the village, on the roads leading to nearby towns, in marshes, in meadows, and along riverbanks.

In the summer of 1888 – probably just a matter of weeks after La Seine près de Giverny was painted – the artist and part-time journalist, Georges Jeanniot, paid Monet a visit. He went on to provide the earliest description of his host's working practices at Giverny, writing in the journal La Cravache Parisienne: "Monet would stop before the most dissimilar scenes, admiring each and making me aware of how splendid and unexpected nature is. Once in front of his easel, he draws in a few lines with the charcoal and then attacks the painting directly, handling his long brushes with an astounding agility and an unerring sense of design. He paints with a full brush and uses four or five pure colors; he juxtaposes or superimposes the unmixed paints on the canvas. His landscape is swiftly set down and could, if necessary, be considered complete after only one session, a session which lasts... as long as the effect he is seeking lasts, an hour and often much less" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1978, p. 21).

In the autumn of 1888, when local farmers took to harvesting the wheat in fields near his house, Monet painted the first pictures of what would become his iconic "Grainstacks" series. For La Seine près de Giverny, however, he hit upon a more familiar subject: the River Seine, captured roughly a mile south-west of Le Pressoir. What he produced was a stunningly nuanced and delicate landscape, one so decoratively elegant as to hint at abstraction. Notable alongside the vivid palette, with its harmonious blend of warm colors, is the bravura brushwork, Monet deploying an array of variegated strokes. These range from the thick horizontal marks capturing the ripples on the water and the reflection of the trees, via the richly textured dabs of layered paint denoting the foliage on those trees, to the more smoothly executed passages designating the sky. By this point of Monet's career, composition and execution had all but become inseparable.

The Seine was an enduring source of inspiration for Monet. "I have painted the Seine all my life, at all hours of the day, and in every season," he once declared. "I have never been bored with it. To me it is always different" (Monet quoted in ibid., p. 18). In the early part of his career, he commonly depicted the recreation and industry that the river sustained. However, over time, his interest in human presence waned, and what mattered to him – in line with Impressionistic practice – was translating into paint the evanescent effects of light and shimmering reflections as they played across the river's surface.

It's worth noting that when Monet painted La Seine près de Giverny, a backlash was developing against Impressionism. Its focus on optical effects was starting to be viewed as a source of weakness, associated with transience where a new type of painting – Neo-Impressionism, with its emphasis on structure and a scientific application of paint – was associated with permanence. In 1886, Seurat had stunned the art world by exhibiting Dimanche à la Grande Jatte, a painting which heralded the arrival of a new avant-garde idiom. Unlike Pissarro, who was won over to the Neo-Impressionist cause, and Renoir, who had been working in a classicizing vein since the early 1880s, Monet remained a dedicated proponent of Impressionism, and he took up Seurat's challenge with aplomb. "He must have realized that he was truly on his own," Paul Tucker has written, "and that if Impressionism was going to continue to be a viable style equal to the likes of Seurat's pseudo-scientific method, it was up to him to prove it" (op. cit., 1995, p. 127).

La Seine près de Giverny, therefore, represents not just a joyful return to the home comforts of Giverny after months away, but also a forceful assertion of Impressionism's continued relevance and vitality.

According to the art historian, Christian von Holst, writing of Monet's scenes of Giverny from around this time: "In his rapid perception and execution, he celebrated the fascinating allure of brief moments, intensified the expressive power of color, and gave life to the paintings as works of art. These occasional fireworks of light and color emancipate themselves from their subject, their familiar natural environment, and they metamorphose into pure painting. The landscapes remain recognizable, of course, yet Monet's increasingly liberal approach to individual objects... culminates in an autonomy of painterly expression at which we gaze in awe" (quoted in Claude Monet: Fields in Spring, exh. cat., Stuttgart, 2006, p. 34).

The first private owner of La Seine près de Giverny was the Boston-based banker and broker, Henry Sayles, who purchased the work from Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie. in Paris. An avid art collector with a longstanding enthusiasm for the work of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, as well as pastoral scenes by the Barbizon school, in time, encouraged by artist friends, he began to enhance his collection with more avant-garde works: by the French Impressionists.

In the spring of 1892, Sayles loaned La Seine près de Giverny to a landmark Monet exhibition at Boston's St. Botolph Club. Featuring 20 works, it is believed to have been the Frenchman's first major solo show in the United States. Within a few months, the painting was in the collection of its next recorded owners, the Chicago couple, Potter and Bertha Palmer. He was his city's largest landowner, a merchant magnate who had created the dry goods store, Potter Palmer & Company; she was the queen of Chicago high society, her charity balls and New Year's Day parties widely considered the social events of the season. Bertha also served as president of the Board of Lady Managers at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, and was instrumental in organizing the exhibits in the Woman's Building.

The Palmers possessed a first-rate art collection, put together largely by Bertha. She was particularly fond of French Impressionism and did as much as anyone to promote it in her homeland – even two decades after its launch, the style was still too radical for the tastes of many Americans. Bertha acquired as many as ninety works by Monet alone. Following her death in 1918 (Potter having passed away the previous decade), the Art Institute of Chicago was bequeathed a large number of the Palmers' paintings. These form the core of that museum's impressive holdings of Impressionist work today.

The couple's son, Potter Jr., chose to hang on to La Seine près de Giverny until his own death in 1943. It was sold at auction a year later. The painting was acquired by its current owners in 1978 and comes to the market now for the first time in 45 years.


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