By David Russell

Focusing a 300 mm lens on the Oise River shoreline we were huggingto avoid the wakes created by tankers and freighters ten times our size and moving twice as fast as our 18 passenger tourist barge, I noticed something I would never had thought of twice, had not our group seen a slide show on the artist Monet just two hours earlier.

We had departed Auvers that morning, leaving the memory of Van Gogh behind and were now motoring to a landing where a waiting bus would motor us to Monet’s Giverny home.

I had big plans there. I was going to address Monet’s garden and pond with my 35 mm camera, trying to match my lens openings to what I imagined were Monet’s framings, while also trying to match the time of day and light conditions of his painting hours.

Perhaps all those thoughts merged in my brain as I brought my lens into sharp focus. What I saw through the camera was a swirling slick of oil moving in and out of the sun catching different angles and looking like a spectrum of slowly eddying colors and shapes; a never ending cycle, like impressionistic canvases, if they could move.

Monet and Water were together since his birth in La Havre, a major sea port for local and International shipping, It is obvious water fascinated Monet.

Looking at his body of work, water related subjects always found their way to his canvases: boats, ports, shorelines, storms and as he aged calmer waters.

Marcel Proust applauded Monet’ with these lines: “...there would be not these flowers on earth … such tender water lilies as the Master has depicted in his sublime canvases.”

Early samples of Monet’s fascination with water themes were “The Pointe de la Heve at Low Tide’”. “The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur” and “The Beach at Saute – Adresse.”. Each canvass revealed Monet’s hard edge with strokes bold and heavy from a mainly dark palette.

When he returned to Paris seeking La Salon approval, that same hard edged look and broad strokes were applied in his character studies, such as “The Woman In The Green Dress” which earned him ready approval.

His interest in character work was short lived and he soon returned to studies of landscape. first, without and then later, with people added. All done in his studio until the impressionist Plen Air movement attracted him to try his hand at painting scenes outdoors in their natural environment. Monet, preferred working on enormous canvases, both in studio and out, displayed his early Plen Air skills with his enormous, “The Green Wave”.

However, as I continued to stare at the moving water, watching it spiral in and out of the sunlight, it seemed animated, paintings made one following the other, by strokes from an invisible hand with an invisible brush.

That oil slick and its impressions is at the heart of my story.

I believe Monet given the choice of traveling overland or by river boat for the half day’s journey between his home and Paris would always chose the boat.

Part of my reasoning for his choosing the water way was his familiarity with it. Example, to paint the water scene “La Grenouillere”, Monet had to carry his easel and paints into the river or work from the deck of a small boat. So the $64,000 question? Had Claude Monet, while on the river that day or in his water travels seen a swirl of water and light effected by a slick of oil such as I had seen.

If so, my theory is that those impressionistic swirls - intended or not - influenced his creative bent and drove his brush to its impressionistic replication in the painting of his pond lilies.

Many stops filled Monet’s early years before he arrived at Giverny. After his Paris stay, he moved into his first real house, at Argenteuil, which provided him a fertile ground to continue his systematic pursuit of how various architectural shapes were altered by the influence of light and water. One result was “The New Railway Bridge”. The water in that canvas conveys a softer, less edgy look, precursor to what was to come.

From Argentuil, Monet returned to Paris to financially trade on his growing reputation. There, his large railroad station, flag draped boulevard on Bastille Day and other works brought both recognition and financial stability.

With his monetary needs met, Monet returned to painting water. His second house actually on the banks of the Seine at Vetheuil, led Monet to write a friend, “You may have heard that I pitched my tent on the banks of the Seine at Vetheuil, in a ravishing place.”. But Vetheuil proved not to be a wonderful place; his wife Camille died suddenly.

Though, that year, the river did become the subject for a series of winter landscapes, those canvases were filled with remorse, an end to his youth and coming at a time when the Impressionist movement was on the wane.

By 1883, it was a much different, more optimistic Monet, as he moved into his new house in Giverny, enthusing that the area was “Splendid Country For Me. I am in Ecstasy”.

Giverny, about 40 miles northwest of Paris at the junction of Epte and Seine river, obviously suited him because seven years later he bought the property, declaring that he was “certain of never finding a comparable house nor such beautiful countryside anywhere else.”.

After his wife’s death, Alice Hoschede, his housekeeper, who was married to Monet’s business manager, moved with him to Giverny saying she had to look after Monet’s two sons, while husband, Ernst, stayed in Paris “doing business”.

Not only did Alice change his domestic scene, his painting style changed as well. He lost the somber pallet, now preferring lighter tones and softer brush strokes. In a painting of Alice’s daughters, the blue & white dressed girls are echoed by muted water reflections in “Boat at Giverny”

Yet, as much as he enthused about Giverny, permanently settling in took many years. No sooner had he moved in, than he took his first away, journeying to meet his friend Renoir on the Mediterranean Coast.

What he saw there so impressed him, he soon returned, spending 3 months “painting alone” in tropically vegetated Bordighera, just across the Italian border. In a letter he told Alice that he desired to paint “...the orange and lemon trees standing against the blue sea”. Which he did time and again.

Following his Mediterranean stay, in a quest for new water to study, Monet moved to the Brittany Coast. lodging in fisherman’s quarters. There, he put his hand to capturing the wild and rocky coast, which he described in a letter to Alice, noting, “I know that to paint the sea truly, you have to see it everyday at all hours and at the same spot, so you get to understand the life of it at that spot; so I do the same subject sometimes four or even six times over..”

Of his Brittany work, Monet successfully sold 10 canvases to Theo Gogh, something brother Van never did; Van sold not a single canvas in his lifetime.

Art critic Felix Feneon in a Revue Independante column titled the Brittany paintings “Ten Antibes Seascapes”. Later Monet learned that the show “...really won over the public, mulish as it is.”

From that day forward, Monet began grouping his work as Feneon had, concentrating on a multitude of paintings done at a single location . Moving to the Cruese Gorge, he did nine seascapes of the same subject varying his painting hours from dawn to dusk.

Returning home to Giverny, he turned his hand to capturing images of the local waters such as in his “Study of a Boat”, and “Boating at Giverny”, again showing the three Hoschede sisters.

Continuing his studies into the effects of light and the use of color, Monet painted fields and trees including his famous hay stack series.

Compared to his earlier bold, rugged, hard edged Brittany Coast paintings his work “”Cliff at Varengeville” is a luminous canvas of yellow grasses and a blue sea muted with blended lemon grass tones.

Straying again from Giverny, he traveled to Venice where he wrote Alice that he adored the glorious light on the canal, adding as an afterthought that “I pine for Giverny. Everything Must Be So Beautiful There In The Glorious Weather”.

Back in my real time, while our motor barge slowed and was about to dock, for perhaps the third time that day, i wiped clean all of my camera lenses, double checked what were a new set of batteries, both for camera and flash plus my back-up camera. Then, finally I double checked to be certain each camera loaded with fresh film rolls was ready.

Ha!! I needn’t have rushed; the bus ride including a box lunch was 2 hours. When we finally did arrive, the path from the bus to the house provided our first look at the garden so carefully nurtured by Monet and Alice. Its present care-taker was much less caring; the garden looked an overgrown riot of color.

Monet’s house was filled with Japanese prints and copies of his art, which we later learned came from a thriving on-site retail outlet that sold prints to visitors while shipping tens of thousands of prints to sources world wide.

Monet had no idea how successful he would become.

As it turned out, all our group was allotted was one hour at the pond, so my dream of matching different light at different times of the day went k-pooey. With and without flash, I did expose six rolls of 100 to 800 ASA Fuji Pro stock. Deliberately, moving around the pond I worked at catching shadows and light, snapping the bridge with and without foliage or people, while taking multiple exposures of various pond arrangements. I diligently did my hour until the leader hoarse from her efforts, finally pulled us away, but through the required retail store stop, delivering us back to the barge by 7:45PM, a bit late for our cocktail hour, but we made up for missed time.

The balance of our cruise took us through the French locks system which elevated us , lock by lock, till we reached Paris. There, we had our mandatory visits to the Louvre, the Museum of Impressionist Art and Musee de Orsay, enjoying much Van Gogh and Monet work. And, a must when in Paris, ate and drank more than our fair share of the best Paris had to offer.

Back home, by my third day, I was impatient, waiting for the lab to complete processing my film. Finally, with prints in hand, I could compare my attempts to paint with my camera what Monet had painted with his brush. For a non–professional I thought I did well.

What I was equally sure of, was that I knew more about French art and artists from the l800-l900 period then I did before our trip. Also I had a better understanding that to be a true artist -- in paint, dance, music, theatre,no one succeeds without a lot of invested time, energy, loving care, and a lot of luck. Plus that special ingredient so few of us have – true talent.

Though I love taking pictures, I’m smart enough to know a great photographer I’m not. Monet, I certainly am not. What I am, I believe, is in good company.

® and © - 2008 - David Russell