How Monet made his money
He was so obsessed with his work that he never stopped — even carrying on painting while the barber cut his hair
WheN an artist chances upon a successful subject by which he or she will ever afterwards instantly and indelibly become identified — Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, Tracey emin’s bed — the best thing to do is stick with it.
Claude monet painted water lilies literally by the yard, ‘buckets of colour on 100ft walls’. A modest monet was 5ft high and 6.5 ft wide. his studio was 76 ft long and 39 ft wide, and stood 49 ft tall.
When unrolled, the water lily panels bequeathed to the French nation stretched for 295 ft: ‘The work of a colossus,’ says Ross King in his enthusiastic biography.
monet hadn’t always been popular. Indeed, you could say that for many years a fool and his monet were soon parted, and canvases went for 20 francs.
‘Impressionism’ was a pejorative term, used to dismiss ‘blurry images and seemingly casual brushwork’ which ‘violated prevailing conventions’ — i.e. the notions of 19th-century varnished realism that anticipated photography.
People who bought a monet were sneered at as ‘idiots and hucksters’ — though what they mostly were, in fact, were Americans who called in at Giverny to see the artist on their way to the ocean liners at Le havre.
hundreds of monets decorated the mansions of tycoons in New York and Chicago. The wife of a department store owner ‘bought 25 monets in a single year’.
By 1912, monet was earning 369,000 francs — when the average annual income for a labourer in Paris was 1,000 francs. Giverny, 40 miles northwest of Paris, became monet’s home in 1883, when he was aged 42.
King makes the Normandy countryside sound idyllic: ‘A line of tall poplars snaked across the meadows that in may were stippled with poppies and that in autumn were populated by towering stacks of wheat.’
It was the artist’s ambition to depict the effects on the scene of weather and light.
‘everything changes,’ said monet, ‘even stone’ — and he was fascinated by the interplay of pale greens, dusky mauves, salmon pinks and fiery oranges. his layers of paint resemble nothing so much as ‘melting ice-creams’.
With money finally coming in, monet uprooted the vegetable plot and planted irises, tulips and Japanese peonies — ‘multicoloured flowerbeds and, at the centre, a grand alley flanked by a pair of yew trees and festooned with roses spiralling over metal frames’.
By means of a system of sluices and grilles, monet transformed a parcel of marshland into his famous water garden, inspired by hokusai’s woodblocks. his water lilies, with their palettes of yellows, blues and pinks, were imported from mexico.
Approximately 40,000 francs a year went on maintaining the Japanese bridge, wisteria, bamboo, rhododendrons and cherry blossom trees. It was all material for more than 300 classic paintings.
But the paradise was threatened when war broke out in 1914, and europe began its ‘race into the abyss’.
MoNeT was determined not to flee. ‘I shall stay here regardless, and if those barbarians wish to kill me, I shall die among my canvases in front of my life’s work,’ he stipulated bravely.
As two million Germans poured over the French frontier, and after 27,000 French soldiers were killed at Charleroi on a single day, the refugees started arriving in Giverny.
‘Children weeping noisily on carts and old people, broken by pain and emotion, sobbing silently, heads buried in their hands.’
By the end of hostilities, 1.4million lives were lost — a quarter of all the males born in France in the 1890s.
With the network of trenches stretching between the North Sea and the Swiss border, it was understandable if those who were starving and under-fire shouted: ‘This is no time for art!’
Nevertheless, the French government fretted about moving treasures from the Louvre to Toulouse for safekeeping.
The Prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who had spent much time in the battle zones and had witnessed the ‘brutal and senseless destruction of monuments consecrated by both art and time’, saw that civilised values were at stake — the hun had now smashed 6,000 churches, town halls and schools and numerous cathedrals.
Reims, for example, was a victim of German artillery, its stained glass and statues the target of 2,500 shells a day.
Against this chaos, monet became a powerful symbol of the life worth fighting for — his pictures of Normandy, with the poppies now reminiscent of blood and death and the weeping willows with their mournful air, were ‘feats of supreme beauty that were evidence of French cultural and moral superiority’, said Clemenceau.
his pictures were ‘an asylum of peaceful meditation’ in the same way that Constable’s
cathedral spires and hay wains, and Moore’s sculptures of mothers and children, are iconic for the British.
Throughout the war, Monet never stopped working. His barber had to cut his hair as he painted.
In appearance ‘a rough farmer, a hunter of wolves and bears’, he ate and drank in huge quantities, starting the day with a glass of white wine.
Despite being diagnosed with cataracts in 1912, which made his vision ‘muddy, bland, indistinct’, he refused any operation until 1923, by which time he was blind in his right eye and his left eye had only ten per cent vision. He had to endure an iridectomy and cataract extraction, cocaine having first been injected into the optic nerve. Monet was understandably terrified and vomited. He said he felt sharp electrical pains shooting up the centre of the eye itself. When the bandages were removed 38 days later, everything looked blue. He had a condition called cyanopsia. New spectacle lenses the size of jam pots were manufactured by Zeiss. The effect was alarming, for Monet’s magnified eyes now ‘seemed to possess the properties of a searchlight and be ready to seize on the innermost secrets of a visible world’, said the chairman of the Tate Gallery.
During the war, Monet had donated pictures to charities for raffle prizes. His chief gifts to the nation, however, were the vast water lily panels now at the Musee de l’Orangerie.
Only in the year 2000 did the government spend $36 million protecting them with polyester film in a climate-controlled gallery with specially curved walls — Monet himself had been meticulous about the construction of an elliptical room for his work.
His own most severe critic, he said ruefully of his pictures and their display: ‘When I am dead I shall find their imperfections bearable.’
He died of lung cancer aged 86 in 1926. Clemenceau raced to his deathbed and ensured that the coffin was decorated with a cloth embroidered with periwinkles and hydrangeas.
‘No black for Monet,’ he decreed.