k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
As usual I was going down the rabbit hole and . . .
Claude Monet (1840 –1926) and Alice Hoschedé lived together with their children even before his 1st wife’s death. Monet proposed to Alice while her husband, Ernest Hoschedé, was still alive and in Paris, too, but she waited until his death in 1891 to agree. They were married that year. In 1883 Monet rented the house in Giverny (guh·vur·nee) where his most famous paintings were created. He used a barn as a studio and he had a small garden. There was a school nearby where he sent his two children by his 1st wife, Camille, and Alice’s six children.
Impressionism was becoming a more accepted and popular form of painting and Monet was at the forefront of this wave. Monet showed at a group exhibition in 1882, ignoring the others in 1880, 1881, and 1886. His dealer was selling more and more of his paintings, so much so that In November 1890 Monet could afford to not only buy his house, but to buy the surrounding buildings and land for his gardens.
With this land he built a greenhouse and another studio. This studio suited his preference for painting “en plein air” (outdoors) because it was spacious and lit by skylights. “I am only good at two things, and those are gardening and painting.” “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.1
Starting in the 1880’s Monet worked on paintings with a similar motif, known as his “series” paintings. He would paint the same subject, but he would vary it with different light, weather conditions and points of view. These series include: Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, the Houses of Parliament, views of Charing Cross Bridge, Weeping Willows, Mornings on the Seine, and his legendary Water Lilies.
The Weeping Willows series Monet painted were homage to the fallen French soldiers of World War I. This war affected Monet especially since his only surviving son, Michel, served.
Monet journeyed to Venice, Italy with his wife, Alice in 1908. She usually did not go far from Giverny but they were invited by their friend Mary Hunter. The trip filled his wife Alice with joy: Usually they would not stray far from Giverny, where Monet had been exploring the secrets of his water lilies for five years. Two weeks into their stay Hunter had to leave, so the couple moved to a hotel with electric lighting. Monet could easily see his work. They had electricity installed as soon as they returned to Giverny! Alice wrote that she was “happy to see Monet so impassioned, doing such beautiful things, and—between you and me—something other than those same old water lilies.”1
The Monets arrived in Venice by train on October 1, 1908. Monet was 68 when he discovered Venice. “It is too beautiful to be painted! It is untranslatable!” Monet exclaimed. But of course, he took up the challenge. He had already been in Italy but only the Riviera. He and his wife stayed in the Barbaro Palace on the Grand Canal.
Once Mary Hunter was forced to leave Venice, the Monets settled in the Grand Hotel Britannia, because Monet had “begun to paint marvelous things” under his wife’s admiring eyes. “The view out of our window is marvelous. You couldn’t dream of anything more beautiful and it is all for Monet,” Alice wrote her daughter. The sojourn turned into a real painting campaign. After Alice died in 1911, from myeloid leukemia, Monet would wait a long time before completing the canvases in his studio. Twenty-nine canvases were put on exhibit in Paris, four years after the trip, in 1912. The exhibition was an enormous success.
Around 1912, when Monet was 72, he was diagnosed with cataracts, which altered his perceptions of color and made things look blurry or hazy. For 10 years, Monet continued to paint as his eyesight deteriorated. Monet had painted ten Weeping Willow paintings by 1919, apparently in mournful response to the mass tragedy of World War I. Monet, who destroyed nearly 500 of his own paintings, expresses himself as: “Many people think I paint easily… I often suffer tortures when I paint.”
At the end of 1926, Monet died. He had insisted that the ceremony be simple, so he was buried in the Giverny church cemetery in Normandy. Only about 50 people attended the ceremony. His friend Georges Clémenceau, former Prime Minister of France, insisted that the cloth thrown over the casket be floral, rather than black because Impressionists rarely use black in their paintings.
1 https://www.cmonetgallery.com/biography-late-years.aspx
