The Art of Grief
by Phyllis Tuchman
JANUARY 13, 2009 TAGS:
Impressionist Claude Monet was distraught. Despite a few adulatory press notices and the sale of some paintings and works on paper, the 38-year-old artist could not support his small family. Constantly broke, Monet approached collectors as well as friends and colleagues such as Frederic Bazille, Gustave Courbet, and Edouard Manet for loans and handouts. He could hardly afford art supplies. And now his wife, Camille Doncieux, the mother of his two young sons, was on her deathbed. She was 32.
After a long illness, probably uterine cancer, Camille succumbed on Sept. 5, 1879, and at her side Monet painted his grief. He wrote Georges Clemenceau, later the eminent French statesman and a dear friend, that “finding myself at the deathbed of a loved one, I was surprised … by the colors that death brought to her immobile face.” The changing tones of blue, yellow, and gray mesmerized him. Reacting instinctively, he “found himself desiring to reproduce the last image of she who would leave us forever.” He used long, rapid brushstrokes and subdued colors.
Though he would live for 47 more years, enjoying love and fame, Monet carried Camille always in his heart. His tender depiction of her was hanging in his bedroom when he died at the age of 86 in 1926. After the oil entered the collection of Michel Monet, the executor of his father’s estate, the work remained unknown for 38 years. Today, it belongs to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and is often on view.
For Monet authority Charles Stuckey, the poignant painting is “truly a labor of love.” Art Institute of Chicago curator Gloria Groom points out, “This was one of the most tragic moments of Monet’s life. And he chose to remember this moment that would never repeat itself, exactly what the Impressionists did.” With one twist: These artists painted light, not death.
Monet always wanted to see his art hanging in the Louvre. But it wasn’t his landscapes he pictured in its palatial galleries. Monet had his figure paintings in mind. And the woman who posed for many of these over the course of 13 years was Camille Doncieux. The artist met his attractive model, who was born in Lyon and raised in Paris, when she was 18; he married her in 1870, almost three years after the birth of their first son, Jean. Their life together resembled scenes from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme crossed with chapters from Emile Zola’s l’Oeuvre.
But unlike the Italian composer or the French novelist, Monet did not transform extreme poverty, incurable illness, and artistic indecision into art. When Camille appears in the Impressionist’s paintings, she wears fashionable dresses to a picnic in a forest clearing; sits on the beach elegantly holding a parasol; lunches with her young child at a food-laden table; and fans herself while wrapped in a dramatic Japanese kimono. Then, too, the friends who visited the Monets at the houses they rented in Argenteuil during the early 1870s were artists facing real struggles. When the 30-something artist wrote to Camille Pissarro that “Renoir’s not here — you can have the bed,” he was extending a concrete invitation.
With Camille Doncieux as his model, Monet executed a number of large, ambitious paintings. In 1865, he began the Luncheon on the Grass in which 11 friends, stylishly attired, attend a picnic beneath a canopy of light-dappled green leaves. The artist’s future wife posed for several of the seated and standing women. Had the fledgling artist finished this multi-figure composition set in the Forest of Fontainebleau, it would have been a spectacular 15-by-20 feet, the dimensions academic artists favored. As it is, the sketch measures 4-by-6 feet.
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For Camille in a Green Dress, which Monet sent to the Salon of 1866, he borrowed a stunning garment that Frederic Bazille had rented to execute one of his own oil pictures. The stark, imposing panel — it’s 89 3/4-by-58 5/8 inches — isn’t the sort of work generally associated with the Monet we know. Nevertheless, it drew comment. Emile Zola, who’d just begun writing art criticism, observed, “I confess that the canvas which made me pause the longest is M. Monet’s Camille. Now here is an energetic and living work…. Look at the dress. It is supple and solid. It drags gently, it lives, it clearly states what this woman is about.”
Shortly afterwards, Monet planned the fetching Women in the Garden, another outdoor scene with life-size figures. To work on the top of his canvas, he dug a trench in the ground so that he could manipulate the 104 3/8-by-81 7/8-inch painting with pulleys. Camille posed for the four chic figures. Stuckey has pointed out that “the painting is a monumental version of the sort of illustration used in fashion magazines.”
Unfortunately, Monet could no longer afford to execute huge, costly works. He wrote a friend, “I have made an important decision, that is, to leave aside for the moment all the big things I was doing since they just eat up money and put me in debt.”
Over the course of the next several years, along the Normandy Coast, at Sainte-Adresse and Honfleur, on a bank of the Seine in Bennecourt, at Etretat and Bougival, Monet painted small, portable landscapes. On the beach at Trouville, the largest one with his wife — she is sketchily rendered - is only 18 ½ inches wide.
Beginning in December 1871, the Monets rented the first of two houses in Argenteuil, gathering places for friends like Manet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Now, they, too, painted their hostess: Camille sitting in her garden, reading on a couch, standing in doorways, aboard the boat her husband used as an atelier. And with her son Jean, she appeared in a number of domestic scenes.
In 1876, for the second Impressionist show, Monet painted La Japonaise. For what turned out to be his last large-scale portrait of her, a blond-wigged Camille vamped in a spectacular red kimono borrowed from a friend. Though the 91 1/4-inch-high picture of an exotically dressed woman in front of a wall covered with Japanese fans got the attention the artist sought, he remained broke.
Though Camille appeared in a few more easel-sized paintings, her husband was involved with a new kind of serial imagery. From a studio Monet briefly let in Paris in 1877, for example, he developed views of the Saint-Lazare train station. Returning home, he found Camille sick. “New misfortunes await me,” the artist wrote his doctor. “It’s not enough that I have no money, but my wife is seriously ill…. I am very frightened.” Complicating matters, Camille became pregnant. The couple briefly moved to Paris, where Michel was born in March 1878.
Later that year, the Monets took a small house in Vetheuil with the family of a former, now bankrupt, patron. (The patron’s spouse, Alice Hoschede, later became Monet’s second wife.) Alice cared for Camille and arranged for her to receive last rites. That August, Monet wrote his doctor, “For a long time I have hoped for better days, but, alas, today it is necessary for me to lose all hope … she can no longer stand up, [and] she can not even take the smallest amount of food though she is hungry. We must be continually at her bedside to watch and wait for her smallest desire in hope of helping her in her suffering and sadder still, is the fact that we cannot always satisfy her desires because there is no money. For the past month I have not been able to paint for lack of paints, but that is nothing; for the moment what frightens me most is to see my wife’s life in jeopardy.”
After Camille died, Monet began to paint her one last time. With slashes of chilly blues and mauves, whites and grays, he depicted her face covered by a veil, flowers resting on her inert torso. Working quickly, he portrayed her in his new Impressionist style. Over the course of the next 4 ½ decades, he occasionally executed canvases with figures in an outdoor setting. For the most part, though, Monet put figure painting aside. From that time on, landscapes offered all the inspiration he needed.
Phyllis Tuchman writes for Obit about art and artists.
After a long illness, probably uterine cancer, Camille succumbed on Sept. 5, 1879, and at her side Monet painted his grief. He wrote Georges Clemenceau, later the eminent French statesman and a dear friend, that “finding myself at the deathbed of a loved one, I was surprised … by the colors that death brought to her immobile face.” The changing tones of blue, yellow, and gray mesmerized him. Reacting instinctively, he “found himself desiring to reproduce the last image of she who would leave us forever.” He used long, rapid brushstrokes and subdued colors.Though he would live for 47 more years, enjoying love and fame, Monet carried Camille always in his heart. His tender depiction of her was hanging in his bedroom when he died at the age of 86 in 1926. After the oil entered the collection of Michel Monet, the executor of his father’s estate, the work remained unknown for 38 years. Today, it belongs to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and is often on view.
For Monet authority Charles Stuckey, the poignant painting is “truly a labor of love.” Art Institute of Chicago curator Gloria Groom points out, “This was one of the most tragic moments of Monet’s life. And he chose to remember this moment that would never repeat itself, exactly what the Impressionists did.” With one twist: These artists painted light, not death.
Monet always wanted to see his art hanging in the Louvre. But it wasn’t his landscapes he pictured in its palatial galleries. Monet had his figure paintings in mind. And the woman who posed for many of these over the course of 13 years was Camille Doncieux. The artist met his attractive model, who was born in Lyon and raised in Paris, when she was 18; he married her in 1870, almost three years after the birth of their first son, Jean. Their life together resembled scenes from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme crossed with chapters from Emile Zola’s l’Oeuvre.
But unlike the Italian composer or the French novelist, Monet did not transform extreme poverty, incurable illness, and artistic indecision into art. When Camille appears in the Impressionist’s paintings, she wears fashionable dresses to a picnic in a forest clearing; sits on the beach elegantly holding a parasol; lunches with her young child at a food-laden table; and fans herself while wrapped in a dramatic Japanese kimono. Then, too, the friends who visited the Monets at the houses they rented in Argenteuil during the early 1870s were artists facing real struggles. When the 30-something artist wrote to Camille Pissarro that “Renoir’s not here — you can have the bed,” he was extending a concrete invitation.
With Camille Doncieux as his model, Monet executed a number of large, ambitious paintings. In 1865, he began the Luncheon on the Grass in which 11 friends, stylishly attired, attend a picnic beneath a canopy of light-dappled green leaves. The artist’s future wife posed for several of the seated and standing women. Had the fledgling artist finished this multi-figure composition set in the Forest of Fontainebleau, it would have been a spectacular 15-by-20 feet, the dimensions academic artists favored. As it is, the sketch measures 4-by-6 feet.
For Camille in a Green Dress, which Monet sent to the Salon of 1866, he borrowed a stunning garment that Frederic Bazille had rented to execute one of his own oil pictures. The stark, imposing panel — it’s 89 3/4-by-58 5/8 inches — isn’t the sort of work generally associated with the Monet we know. Nevertheless, it drew comment. Emile Zola, who’d just begun writing art criticism, observed, “I confess that the canvas which made me pause the longest is M. Monet’s Camille. Now here is an energetic and living work…. Look at the dress. It is supple and solid. It drags gently, it lives, it clearly states what this woman is about.”Shortly afterwards, Monet planned the fetching Women in the Garden, another outdoor scene with life-size figures. To work on the top of his canvas, he dug a trench in the ground so that he could manipulate the 104 3/8-by-81 7/8-inch painting with pulleys. Camille posed for the four chic figures. Stuckey has pointed out that “the painting is a monumental version of the sort of illustration used in fashion magazines.”
Unfortunately, Monet could no longer afford to execute huge, costly works. He wrote a friend, “I have made an important decision, that is, to leave aside for the moment all the big things I was doing since they just eat up money and put me in debt.”
Over the course of the next several years, along the Normandy Coast, at Sainte-Adresse and Honfleur, on a bank of the Seine in Bennecourt, at Etretat and Bougival, Monet painted small, portable landscapes. On the beach at Trouville, the largest one with his wife — she is sketchily rendered - is only 18 ½ inches wide.
Beginning in December 1871, the Monets rented the first of two houses in Argenteuil, gathering places for friends like Manet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Now, they, too, painted their hostess: Camille sitting in her garden, reading on a couch, standing in doorways, aboard the boat her husband used as an atelier. And with her son Jean, she appeared in a number of domestic scenes.
In 1876, for the second Impressionist show, Monet painted La Japonaise. For what turned out to be his last large-scale portrait of her, a blond-wigged Camille vamped in a spectacular red kimono borrowed from a friend. Though the 91 1/4-inch-high picture of an exotically dressed woman in front of a wall covered with Japanese fans got the attention the artist sought, he remained broke.
Though Camille appeared in a few more easel-sized paintings, her husband was involved with a new kind of serial imagery. From a studio Monet briefly let in Paris in 1877, for example, he developed views of the Saint-Lazare train station. Returning home, he found Camille sick. “New misfortunes await me,” the artist wrote his doctor. “It’s not enough that I have no money, but my wife is seriously ill…. I am very frightened.” Complicating matters, Camille became pregnant. The couple briefly moved to Paris, where Michel was born in March 1878.
Later that year, the Monets took a small house in Vetheuil with the family of a former, now bankrupt, patron. (The patron’s spouse, Alice Hoschede, later became Monet’s second wife.) Alice cared for Camille and arranged for her to receive last rites. That August, Monet wrote his doctor, “For a long time I have hoped for better days, but, alas, today it is necessary for me to lose all hope … she can no longer stand up, [and] she can not even take the smallest amount of food though she is hungry. We must be continually at her bedside to watch and wait for her smallest desire in hope of helping her in her suffering and sadder still, is the fact that we cannot always satisfy her desires because there is no money. For the past month I have not been able to paint for lack of paints, but that is nothing; for the moment what frightens me most is to see my wife’s life in jeopardy.”After Camille died, Monet began to paint her one last time. With slashes of chilly blues and mauves, whites and grays, he depicted her face covered by a veil, flowers resting on her inert torso. Working quickly, he portrayed her in his new Impressionist style. Over the course of the next 4 ½ decades, he occasionally executed canvases with figures in an outdoor setting. For the most part, though, Monet put figure painting aside. From that time on, landscapes offered all the inspiration he needed.
Phyllis Tuchman writes for Obit about art and artists.
COMMENTS (3) TO ADD A COMMENT, PLEASE FIRST SIGN IN OR REGISTER.
dave kaufmann wrote on January 18, 2009 4:31am
Phyills, Manet's and Camille's truly sad real love story.Thank you for your compassion, and caring. Elizabeth, and I are both painters, and like many lay our hearts out there in our work Sharing your passion with others is sustaining, and a blessing. Most times non rewarding. All the best Dave, and Elizabeth [Report Comment]
robert stark wrote on January 13, 2009 8:35am
While it's a history I'm familiar with it is still a lovely story well told and I enjoyed it. [Report Comment]
Anonymous wrote on January 13, 2009 7:07am
lovely. [Report Comment]
