Woman with a parasol by Claude Monet - Essay Example

Czanne once described Monet as "only an eye- yet what an eye". Monet, who remained a lifelong devotee of Impressionism, had an acute sensitivity to light, color and all visual sensations. Monet sought to portray the essence of what the eye saw in a moment, and this is very apparent in the particular work chosen for discussion: Woman with a Parasol. Like most impressionists, Monet believed in recording the initial sensory reactions rather than idealizing a subject. Monet wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him. He held that the first real look at the motif was likely to be the truest and most unprejudiced one. (Carpenter, 2007) Woman with a Parasol was painted during one of the most fertile early phases of Monet's career, in the early 1870s when he took up residence in Argenteuil, a place of picturesque countrysides. The brilliance of the colors used, and the style in which they were used were characteristic of Monet in this period. "In his Argenteuil paintings of 1874 Monet achieved a greater luminosity than ever before. His colors became brighter and richer, his execution full of vigor. His effects were not, like those of Manet, provided by brilliant accents in generally low-keyed harmonies; the whole scale of his values was concentrated on the greatest purity of high colors, among which the brightest constituted the dominant note". (Rewald,1961) The subject is Monet's family: his wife Camille and son, Jean outdoors on a picnic in en plein air, or outdoors. Monet, more often than not, liked to paint landscapes, or people in casual poses in a natural background caught in a moment. Camille is captured in this painting in a manner that is not posed, but completely natural, spontaneous. Standing at a height, Camille seems to tower over the viewer, emphasizing the upward perspective, her form and that of her son silhouetted against the sunlight. Her dress billows, bringing in a sensation of the breeze to her form. Her form is not solid, it has a sort of movement, an air almost of translucence, her scarf fluttering in the wind almost merges with the clouds and the sky. Jean, coming in from the back, gives a sense of depth and perspective, saving the painting from becoming flat. Though in this picture the subject matter is Camille and Jean, Monet manages to counteract the convention of creating a central form of interest, creating instead a vibrant sensation of light and movement throughout the picture, and therein lies his individual brilliance in the treatment of the subject at hand. For most of his pictures, as with this one, "Monet suggests transience metaphorically, through the formal means at his disposal. He plays on your emotions with color and tonality, ........ Monet ignores the time-honored convention of the center of interest, weighting every portion of his canvas equally with an accumulation of discrete, subtly inflected events". (Wilkin, 1998) Just as her shadow anchors her to the ground and her parasol with its handle provides an anchor to the eye, the green in its underside strongly echoes the green of the grass in front of her, planting her firmly in the picture, and providing the required balance. This brings us to the remarkable artistry of Monet in the use of color, He was a devotee of color, to the extent that he had almost banished black from his canvas. Monet had scientifically studied color, especially Professor Rood's experiments on color, and had come to understand how different colors were affected by sunlight. "Aided by the experiments of the scientists and by his own keen observation, he discovered certain facts which had escaped the notice of less keen eyes unaided by science; for example, that green, seen under strong sunshine, is not green, but yellow; that the shadows cast by sunlight upon snow or upon brightly lighted surfaces are not black, but blue; and that a white dress, seen under the shade of trees on a bright day, has violet or lilac tones". (Cafin,1906) We thus see Monet's innovative use of color: a lot of yellow in the grass; in the shadows instead of pure black we can see blue, and the sunlight is pink, violet and mauve-grey on Camille's skirt. Monet also studied the reflection of light on surfaces, and so we see a bit of yellow on her dress reflected from the grass and wildflowers. The colors of light filtered through the parasol are also shown to advantage in light lilacs and yellows---in the Argenteuil period, Monet often included parasols in his works : "Young ladies in those days seldom ventured out of doors in summertime without a parasol whose colors matched those of their dress. Monet made the most of this gracious accessory (first painted by Courbet), which diffuses light and casts shadows and reflections on faces".(Rouart, 1958) The depiction of the sky is remarkable, the play of the brush strokes which has created the clouds has brought with it a feeling of shimmering air, of sunlight. Monet's innovation lay in further developing the style formerly used by Manet and Courot, and creating his own style: "A new style of painting came into existence which, by means of pure, unmixed colors applied to the canvas in distinct, unblended strokes, suggests the brightness of the sun and the glitter of light with a fresh and natural vivacity which had never before been seen in painting".(Rouart,1958) The wind is shown to blow in from the left, and the sunlight touches the picture from the left creating a swirling flux of light and air. The technique anticipates the pointillist method that Monet is to adopt in his later works, and he applies it with elan on the grass in the Woman with the Parasol, making each blade droop, dance or stand upright, mimicking the playful chaos affected by a gust of wind: "If you stand close to a picture by Monet, you see only a confusion of dabs of different-colored pigments laid on the canvas with separate strokes of the brush-point, in consequence of which this method of painting has been called the pointilliste method. But, if you step further back, these dabs begin to mingle, until they no longer appear separate but merged into a single harmonious effect". (Caffin, 1906) Studying professor Rood's experiments on color "............suggested a new way of applying the pigments to the canvas. Instead of blending them upon the palette, the artist placed them separately side by side upon the canvas, so that the blending might be done by the eye of the spectator, standing at the required distance from the picture". (Caffin, 1906)The audience becomes a part of the painter's expression when the artist uses this pointillist technique. Instead of mixing the colors on the pallette and applying them, Monet and the other impressionists preferred to let the eye of the viewer do some of the work. In the Woman with a Parasol, we see the ephemeral moment in which Camille and Jean stood on a brightly sunlight summer day, the wind blowing through the grass and their clothes. Unlike other Impressionists, Monet gives us the moment as it was without symbolism, interpretation, commentary, or imposition of his own moods or views. It is the moment seen at first glance, at the moment of the first sensory reception, seen in its immediacy, and its spiritual, gossamer essence. But depicting this moment has its own problems: "For Monet and his colleagues, the basic truths of visual experience best could be recognized in the glance, even though its brief and fragmentary character was at odds with the accepted idea that great art should address eternal truths. However, representing the subject of this glance posed an impossible challenge for these artists. forced to recognize the discrepancy between the instantaneous moment required for perception and the longer time necessary to record manually its contents in pictorial terms". (Stuckey, 1995) Since the moment captured on canvas had long passed by the time Monet set about the process of painting and completed it, Woman with a Parasol shows the artist's incredible skill at creating an illusion of that moment with all its luminous sensory vibrations. Works Cited: Caffin, C.H. How to Study Pictures, New York: Century, 1906. p. 459, 460. Carpenter, D. Art of the impressionist painter, Art &Artist, 2006, [accessed 30 April, 2007] Emmons, J. Rouart , D. Claude Monet. New York: Skira, 1958, p.52. 58 Rewald, J.The History of Impressionism. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961, p. 346. Stuckey C.F.Claude Monet: Impressionism's Leading Light. USA Today. Vol 124. Issue: 2606. November 1995. p.37 Wilkin, K. A Thoroughly Modern Monet. New Criterion. Vol: 17, Iss: 4, December 1998. p. 29. Read More