Claude Monet

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Title:     Claude Monet
Author: George Augustus Moore [More Titles by Moore]

Whether the pictures in the Royal Academy be bad or good, the journalist must describe them. The public goes to the Academy, and the journalist must follow the traffic, like the omnibuses. But the public, the English public, does not go to the Salon or to the Champ de Mars. Why, then, should our newspapers waste space on the description of pictures which not one reader in fifty has seen or will see? I suppose the demon of actuality is answerable for the wasted columns, and the demon of habit for my yearly wanderings over deserts of cocoa-nut matting, under tropical skylights, in continual torment from glaring oil-paintings. Of the days I have spent in those exhibitions, nothing remains but the memory of discomfort, and the sense of relief experienced on coming to a room in which there were no pictures. Ah, the arm-chairs into which I slipped and the tapestries that rested my jaded eyes! ... So this year I resolved to break with habit and to visit neither the Salon nor the Champ de Mars. An art critic I am, but surely independent of pictures--at least, of modern pictures; indeed, they stand between me and the interesting article ninety times in a hundred.

Only now and then do we meet a modern artist about whom we may rhapsodise, or at whom we may curse: Claude Monet is surely such an one. So I pricked up my ears when I heard there was an exhibition of his work at Durand Ruel's. I felt I was on the trail of an interesting article, and away I went. The first time I pondered and argued with myself. Then I went with an intelligent lady, and was garrulous, explanatory, and theoretical; she listened, and said she would write out all I had said from her point of view. The third time I went with two artists. We were equally garrulous and argumentative, and with the result that we three left the exhibition more than ever confirmed in the truth of our opinions. I mention these facts, not, as the ill-natured might suppose, because it pleases me to write about my own sayings and doings, but because I believe my conduct to be typical of the conduct of hundreds of others in regard to the present exhibition in the Rue Laffitte; for, let this be said in Monet's honour: every day artists from every country in Europe go there by themselves, with their women friends, and with other artists, and every day since the exhibition opened, the galleries have been the scene of passionate discussion.

My own position regarding Monet is a peculiar one, and I give it for what it is worth. It is about eighteen years since I first made the acquaintance of this remarkable man. Though at first shocked, I was soon convinced of his talent, and set myself about praising him as well as I knew how. But my prophesying was answered by scoffs, jeers, supercilious smiles. Outside of the Cafe of the Nouvelle Athenes, Monet was a laughing-stock. Manet was bad enough; but when it came to Monet, words were inadequate to express sufficient contempt. A shrug of the shoulders or a pitying look, which clearly meant, "Art thou most of madman or simpleton, or, maybe, impudent charlatan who would attract attention to himself by professing admiration for such eccentricity?"

It was thus eighteen years ago; but revolution has changed depth to height, and Monet is now looked upon as the creator of the art of landscape painting; before him nothing was, after him nothing can be, for he has said all things and made the advent of another painter impossible, inconceivable. He who could never do a right thing can now do no wrong one. Canvases beside which the vaguest of Mr. Whistler's nocturnes are clear statements of plain fact, lilac-coloured canvases void of design or tone, or quality of paint, are accepted by a complacent public, and bought by American millionaires for vast sums; and the early canvases about which Paris would not once tolerate a word of praise, are now considered old-fashioned. My personal concern in all this enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the fashionable market-place--is that I once more find myself a dissident, and a dissident in a very small minority. I think of Monet now as I thought of him eighteen years ago. For no moment did it seem to me possible to think of him as an equal of Corot or of Millet. He seemed a painter of great talent, of exceptional dexterity of hand, and of clear and rapid vision. His vision seemed then somewhat impersonal; the temper of his mind did not illuminate his pictures; he was a marvellous mirror, reproducing all the passing phenomena of Nature; and that was all. And looking at his latest work, his views of Rouen Cathedral, it seems to me that he has merely continued to develop the qualities for which we first admired him--clearness of vision and a marvellous technical execution. So extraordinary is this later execution that, by comparison, the earlier seems timid and weak. His naturalism has expanded and strengthened: mine has decayed and almost fallen from me.

Monet's handicraft has grown like a weed; it now overtops and chokes the idea; it seems in these facades to exist by itself, like a monstrous and unnatural ivy, independent of support; and when expression outruns the thought, it ceases to charm. We admire the marvellous mastery with which Monet drew tower and portico: see that tower lifted out of blue haze, no delicacy of real perspective has been omitted; see that portico bathed in sunlight and shadow, no form of ornament has been slurred; but we are fain of some personal sense of beauty, we miss that rare delicacy of perception which delights us in Mr. Whistler's "Venice", and in Guardi's vision of cupolas, stairways, roofs, gondolas, and waterways. Monet sees clearly, and he sees truly, but does he see beautifully? is his an enchanted vision? And is not every picture that fails to move, to transport, to enchant, a mistake?

A work of art is complete in itself. But is any one of these pictures complete in itself? Is not the effect they produce dependent on the number, and may not this set of pictures be compared to a set of scenes in a theatre, the effect of which is attained by combination? There is no foreground in them; the cathedral is always in the first plane, directly, under the eye of the spectator, the wall running out of the picture. The spectator says, "What extraordinary power was necessary to paint twelve views of that cathedral without once having recourse to the illusion of distance!" A feat no doubt it was; and therein we perceive the artistic weakness of the pictures. For art must not be confounded with the strong man in the fair who straddles, holding a full-grown woman on the palm of his hand.

Then the question of the quality of paint. Manet's paint was beautiful as that of an old master; brilliant as an enamel, smooth as an old ivory. But the quality of paint in Monet is that of stone and mortar. It would seem (the thought is too monstrous to be entertained) as if he had striven by thickness of paint and roughness of the handling to reproduce the very material quality of the stonework. This would be realism _a outrance_. I will not think that Monet was haunted for a single instant by so shameful a thought. However this may be, the fact remains that a _trompe-l'oeil_ has been achieved, and four inches of any one of these pictures looked at separately would be mistaken by sight and touch for a piece of stonework. In another picture, in a haystack with the sun shining on it, the _trompe-l'oeil_ has again been as cleverly achieved as by the most cunning of scene-painters. So the haystack is a popular delight.

[The end]
George Moore's essay: Claude Monet

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