Get an impression of Monet in Normandy
FOR Monet there was no such thing as bad weather. Snow, sleet, drizzle, mizzle, fog — all were a source of fascination and inspiration. A new exhibition at London’s national Gallery, Monet & Architecture, brings together his paintings of buildings, all of which serve as backdrops to his exploration of ever-changing light.
The show might just make you feel differently about our very long winter. Because Monet’s art can make even a bleak day in Paris look appealing, as people under umbrella smudges dash through rain.
Spanning the artist’s career until 1912, works depict the French capital, Amsterdam, Rouen, Antibes, London and Venice. It’s a wonderful journey and one you can follow at any time of year, no matter the weather.
even better, you can now stay in Monet’s former home in Vetheuil, a B&B, 11 or so miles from betterknown Giverny and 40 miles northwest of Paris.
Claire and Pascal Gardie, the owners, have re-imagined the interior as it might have been in Monet’s day, filling the rooms with period furniture and the walls with reproductions. This period in Vetheuil (from 1878-81) was not a happy one. To save money, Monet, his unwell wife Camille and two sons, were renting with another family, the Hoschedes, who had six children. It must have been a squeeze.
Monet slept in the modest sitting room, now furnished with an elegant bottle green sofa and neat bucket chairs, while his frail wife was bedridden upstairs.
The cook and nurse both left because they were not paid. Meanwhile, Monet was working furiously, outside as much as possible.
Pretty Vetheuil was an inspiration. He painted the church up the road, with its unexpectedly grand Renaissance front — a view that is not much changed now. He rowed out onto the Seine in his, ‘botin’, a makeshift floating studio, to capture the village overlooking the water. The light reflected by the river must have had him in raptures. At sunset, Vetheuil is lit gold, pink then soft purple.
MoneT also painted more conventional holiday spots — jaunty Trouville with its colourful promenade and charming Honfleur. The normandy cliffs, with their intriguing textures, became quite a distraction. He tackled them with hurried brushstrokes and returned to etretat to portray its cliff arch again and again.
Walk along the coast in blustery weather and you’ll see why he often retreated with his paintbrushes to work from a hotel room.
Stay in Ferme Saint Simeon in Honfleur and you might sleep in one of the rooms frequented by the artist in more prosperous times.
It was popular among painters — Boudin, Corot and Courbet were visitors — and is still run by the family who welcomed Monet all those years ago.
The Cathedral at Rouen proved as exhilarating as the cliffs — he painted it 30 times — and there’s an entire wall devoted to it in the exhibition. Monet loved our capital city, too, clogged as it then was with thickest fog. He wrote enthusiastically in letters to his second wife Alice of how the air would change from yellow to green to blue.
The Houses of Parliament, then a relatively new build, he depicted enshrined in mist, backlit by sun and blended into the murky River Thames.
‘The weather is most variable’, he wrote, ‘but it’s splendid.’