Claude Monet — Beyond Impressionism

· Claude Monet, 'Rounded Flower Bed (formerly titled Gladioli, Corbeille de fleurs)' (1876), oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts (City of Detroit Purchase, 21.71). In the garden at Argenteuil, a woman with a parasol (said to be his wife Camille) dissolves into flowers and light — the essence of the golden age of Monet's plein air painting.
1876 · Detroit Institute of Arts · Sources

Life

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, and spent his childhood in the Normandy port town of Le Havre. As a teenager he drew and sold caricatures of local notables, popular enough that they were displayed in shop windows. It was then that he met the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to plein air painting — working directly from nature out of doors. Boudin taught Monet that "everything painted on the spot has a strength, a power, a vivacity of touch that can never be recovered in the studio," and that single lesson shaped his entire life. In 1859 he went to Paris, met Pissarro at the Académie Suisse, and in Gleyre's studio formed friendships with Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille — the men who would later become the core of the Impressionist group. Through the 1860s, poor and unknown, he was repeatedly rejected by the conservative Salon jury. In 1870 he married Camille Doncieux and, to escape the Franco-Prussian War, crossed to London, where he absorbed the light of Turner and Constable. After returning home he settled in Argenteuil, just outside Paris, from 1871 to 1878, painting the Seine and his own garden and ushering in the golden age of Impressionism. The Detroit Institute of Arts' Rounded Flower Bed (formerly titled Gladioli, 1876) is precisely a product of this Argenteuil period. In April 1874, at the first independent exhibition held in Nadar's studio, Monet showed Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant); the critic Louis Leroy mockingly dubbed the group "the Impressionists," and that gibe soon became the name of an era. When his wife Camille died at thirty-two in 1879, Monet confessed that he had caught himself instinctively studying the shifting colors of light passing over his dying wife's face — and shuddered at it. In 1883 he moved to Giverny, bought the land in 1890, and personally created his garden and water-lily pond. From that same year he devoted himself to series — painting the same subject again and again according to the time of day and the season: the Haystacks (1890–91), the Poplars, Rouen Cathedral (1892–94), the Houses of Parliament in London, and, late in life, the Water Lilies. From around 1908 his eyesight deteriorated sharply due to cataracts, and he worked distinguishing colors almost by the labels and the positions on his palette; but after surgery in 1923 he recovered his sense of blue once more. He died of lung cancer at Giverny on December 5, 1926, at the age of eighty-six. The vast Water Lilies decorative series to which he devoted his final years was dedicated to the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

Style & Innovation

What Monet did first was to make not the 'subject' but 'light itself' the theme of painting. Where traditional painting reproduced objects through contour lines and modeling in light and shade, Monet tried to transfer directly the sensation of color reaching the retina in a given instant. He erased outlines, used the complementary color of shadow instead of black, and filled the canvas with short, broken brushstrokes (broken color). This is the place he occupies in the seven-section narrative of this exhibition — if Section 1's Courbet painted 'the reality visible to the eye' with weight and Realism, then Monet, Renoir, and Degas in Section 2 dissolved that reality into 'a transient phenomenon that light repaints at every moment.' Monet's most revolutionary invention is the 'series.' By painting the Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and the Water Lilies dozens of times from the same spot, changing only the hour, the weather, and the season, he proved that the true subject of painting is not the object but the light and atmosphere flowing over it. Standing before the Rouen Cathedral series, the viewer sees not stone but morning mist, midday sun, and the pink of dusk. This idea opens the door to later abstraction — a path on which the object disappears and only color and sensation remain. The first button fastened in the narrative that ends this exhibition with Kandinsky's abstraction in Section 7 is precisely Monet's light. The DIA's Rounded Flower Bed (1876) predates the series stage, yet it already holds the seed — that same year Monet painted his own garden at Argenteuil repeatedly, from multiple viewpoints and compositions, and this way of thinking — 'turning a single place into a plurality of pictorial events' — soon developed into the series. He also pushed plein air painting to its limit, completing works outdoors directly, quickly, in a single breath, and made the 'immediacy of observation' an ethic of painting.

Technique

From a distance Monet's surface reads as crisp form, but up close the outlines vanish and only dots and strokes of color remain. This 'decomposition and synthesis according to distance' is the heart of his technique. Rather than covering and blending one color over another, he juxtaposed pure colors side by side on the canvas (broken color) so that they mixed optically in the viewer's eye — placing red and pink blossoms directly beside green leaves, for instance, to create the shimmer of summer air (the DIA's official commentary on Rounded Flower Bed notes thick, short brushstrokes that look like dots up close but synthesize from afar). For shadows he uses not black but the complementary of the object. Put your nose up to the shade of the grass, beneath the flowers, or to the dark folds of clothing, and you will find not black but blue, violet, and teal laid down there. The direction and length of the brushmarks, which distinguish texture, are also an important point of observation — water and sky are stroked long and horizontal, leaves and petals dabbed in short broken touches, and thickly loaded paint (impasto) casts its own small shadows under raking light. Monet often worked on a canvas given a colored ground (usually a pale beige or gray) and deliberately let that ground show through in places to set the overall tonal key — look for this ground color in the small gaps between strokes of paint, and you will see that he built his colors not on a white canvas but on a surface already toned. Painted in 1876, Rounded Flower Bed is also fascinating in terms of its history as an object. The Detroit Institute of Arts long called the painting 'Gladioli,' but on the basis of research into the work (exhibition records, documentary study, and the like) it renamed it to its title at the third Impressionist group exhibition of 1877, 'Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs)' — a rare case in which the title of a work itself was changed through scholarship.

Key Works

*Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs)* · Rounded Flower Bed (formerly titled: Gladioli)Likely in showDIA collection
1876 · Oil on canvas · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA — City of Detroit Purchase, accession no. 21.71 · Sources

Why it matters

The 'only' Monet painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts' collection, and the essence of the plein air painting of Monet's Argenteuil period (1871–78). In the Impressionism section (Section 2), it is the work in which you can most directly confirm Monet's technique of capturing fleeting moments of light and atmosphere through the juxtaposition of color. Research indicates that this picture was shown at the third Impressionist group exhibition of 1877 under the title 'Corbeille de fleurs,' and it was around that very moment that the participating artists began calling themselves 'Impressionists' — meaning it hung at the time the movement's name was taking hold. It is also a symbolic holding in the history of America's early reception of Impressionism, having been purchased directly by the DIA in 1921 with city funds.

👁 What to look for

Notice how the woman with the parasol in the picture (said to be Monet's wife, Camille) all but melts into the flowers and the light, her outline blurred — she is not the 'protagonist' but a part of the garden as a landscape of light, merely a measure of the space. Up close, the tall gladiolus blossoms are impasto built from overlapping short touches of red, pink, orange, and white, and in the grass's shadow lie not black but blue and violet. Step back and experience for yourself the magic by which these individual specks of color optically merge into a single flower. Viewed at an angle from the side, the thickness of the paint and the direction of the rapid brushwork are revealed as well.

Backstory

Monet painted this picture in the garden of his own house at Argenteuil, just outside Paris. Here, from 1871 to 1878, he opened the golden age of Impressionism with the Seine and his garden as his stage, and the group known as 'the Impressionists' formed in this period in this very neighborhood. For a long time the painting was called 'Gladioli,' but researchers at the Detroit Institute of Arts, drawing on records such as its entry in the third group exhibition of 1877, established that its original title was 'Corbeille de fleurs (Rounded Flower Bed)' and renamed it accordingly. In 2017 the DIA also built a special exhibition, 'Monet: Framing Life,' around this picture, gathering garden paintings of Monet and Renoir from the Argenteuil period to shed dimensional light on the place this single work holds in the formative history of Impressionism.

Behind the Canvas

01'Impressionism' was originally a taunt

Seeing Monet's Impression, Sunrise at the first independent exhibition of 1874, the critic Louis Leroy wrote a mocking review titled 'Exhibition of the Impressionists' in the satirical magazine Le Charivari. The jibe was that the work was 'not even as finished as wallpaper in its embryonic state.' Yet Monet and his colleagues embraced this insulting nickname as their own banner, and by the time of the third group exhibition in 1877 they had come to call themselves, officially, 'Impressionists.' One of the paintings that hung in that very 1877 exhibition is believed to be the Rounded Flower Bed now in Detroit.

02The painter who saw color in his dying wife's face

In 1879, in the moment his first wife Camille died at thirty-two, Monet later left a startling confession to his friend Clemenceau. Even at the deathbed of the woman he loved, he caught himself involuntarily 'analyzing as tones of color' the shifts of blue, yellow, and gray that death was casting over her face — and he shuddered. He described it as the fate of one for whom observation had become instinct. Strikingly, the woman with the parasol in the DIA's Rounded Flower Bed is said to be that same Camille — recall her deathbed a few years later alongside this image of her dissolving into light and flowers, and the painting looks different.

03The painter who built his own garden — Giverny's water-lily pond is man-made

When Monet settled at Giverny in 1883, rather than simply seeking out landscapes, he designed the very stage of light he would paint. In 1893 he diverted water from a tributary of the Epte River to dig a pond, built a Japanese bridge, and planted water lilies — but villagers and the authorities objected that 'exotic plants would pollute the river,' and it grew into an administrative dispute. The Water Lilies series we know was born from this 'nature made by hand,' tended by Monet with several gardeners in his employ. The garden painting of Argenteuil (Rounded Flower Bed) is the starting point of this lifelong obsession with gardens.

04The colors of his late years, painted while battling cataracts

From around 1908 Monet's eyesight deteriorated sharply due to cataracts, and he could no longer properly distinguish colors. For a time his canvases grew heavy with reds and browns, and he himself despaired, saying that 'I only know what color I am painting by reading the labels and remembering the positions on my palette.' After surgery on his right eye in 1923, a strong sense of blue suddenly returned, and it is said that he personally reworked or destroyed some of the paintings made during the cataract years. It was the desperate struggle of the painter of light as he was losing the light.

05The Water Lilies series was a tribute to the peace after World War I

On the day after the armistice in November 1918, Monet wrote to his friend and the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, offering to give the French nation two large decorative Water Lilies panels — a tribute honoring the war's end and the coming of peace. That promise was ultimately realized as the great decorative 'Water Lilies' cycle that fills two oval galleries at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, unveiled in 1927, after Monet's death.

What to check in person

Look from a distance vs. up close: first step back three or four paces and take in the whole, then bring your face close to the same passage. What looked like a single flower or a blade of grass from afar 'decomposes' up close into countless specks of color. This transformation according to distance is the heart of appreciating Monet, and the moment you confirm for yourself that the 'blur' is in fact a 'precise juxtaposition of color.'
Find the color within the shadow: Monet uses almost no black in his shadows. Put your nose up to the shade of the grass, beneath the flowers, or to the dark folds of a figure's clothing, and look for the blue, violet, and teal inside. If the light is on the yellow side, the shadow is invariably painted in the complementary range.
Read the direction and length of the brushmarks: grass in short dabs, sky or water stretched long and sideways, petals dabbed thick — Monet distinguishes texture and movement by the direction and length of the brush alone. Follow how the 'grammar' of the touches changes within a single picture.
Look at an angle from the side: viewed obliquely from the edge of the canvas rather than head-on, the thickness of the paint (impasto), the surface sheen, the traces of rapid work, and the dry-brush scumbling laid over already-dry paint emerge in relief. You will even see the gallery lighting strike the ridges of thickly loaded paint to cast small shadows.
Look at the ground color in the 'gaps' between touches: Monet often left the pale colored ground of a canvas deliberately showing through. Examine what ground color (beige, light gray, etc.) appears in the small gaps between one touch of paint and the next, and you will see that Monet built his colors not on a white canvas but on a surface already toned.
See the figure as 'part of the landscape': the woman with the parasol in the DIA's Rounded Flower Bed (said to be Camille) is not the protagonist. Confirm how her outline has melted away into the flowers and the light, and how the face has almost no detail — for Monet, what mattered was not the person but the light flowing over her.
Recall the clue to the retitling: this painting was 'Gladioli' for a long time before being changed to its 1877 exhibition title, 'Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs).' Look for which part of the picture can actually be read as a 'rounded flower bed (a circular structure),' and whether the tall gladioli are mixed with other flowers — there's pleasure in verifying with your own eyes the reason the title was changed.

Connections

Monet is the central axis of this exhibition's Impressionism section (Section 2), a lifelong colleague of Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Sisley in the same section, alongside whom he had worked since the 1860s at Gleyre's studio and the Académie Suisse. With Renoir in particular, he set up his easel side by side at La Grenouillère in 1869, painting the same water-surface scene and jointly developing the techniques of Impressionism (broken color, the rendering of reflected light) — the Argenteuil-period garden paintings such as the DIA's Rounded Flower Bed are products of the years when the two stimulated each other's styles. Upon the 'reality visible to the eye' that Courbet had laid down in the preceding Section 1, Monet dissolved that reality into 'a transient phenomenon that light repaints at every moment.' The concept of the series he developed and his effacement of the object (the way the Rouen Cathedral series makes you see light rather than stone) form the first point of departure on the long journey 'from object to sensation' that leads to Cézanne's structural inquiry in Section 3 and on to Kandinsky's abstraction in Section 7 ('Painting Study for White Form,' 1913). The light of Turner that Monet absorbed during his London exile, and the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e (Japonisme) steeped deep in his work, also show the international context running through all of Impressionism. Since most of the colleagues who gathered at the same group exhibitions (1874, 1877) hang together in Sections 1–3 of this show, to stand before Monet is also to encounter, in one place, the friendships and rivalries of those companions of that era.

Did You Know

Monet's full name was Oscar-Claude Monet, and his family and friends called him 'Oscar.'

As a teenager Monet earned pocket money by drawing and selling caricatures of well-known local figures in Le Havre, popular enough to be displayed in shop windows.

The name 'Impressionism' comes from the title of Monet's 1874 work Impression, Sunrise — a nickname a critic actually coined to ridicule it.

The Detroit Institute of Arts holds just one Monet painting, long called 'Gladioli' before the museum's research changed its title to 'Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs).'

Research indicates this picture hung at the third Impressionist group exhibition of 1877 under the title 'Corbeille de fleurs,' and it was right around then that the participating painters embraced for themselves the label 'Impressionists.'

The DIA 'purchased its single Monet directly with the City of Detroit's funds' in 1921 (accession no. 21.71, credit line 'City of Detroit Purchase'). That the city itself bought the painting symbolizes the public character of the Detroit collection.

Monet was as earnest about gardening as about painting; at Giverny he employed several gardeners and personally imported rare plants. He said that perhaps he became a painter thanks to flowers.

⚖ Notes still to verify

Monet's 'Rounded Flower Bed (formerly Gladioli)' (1876) is featured in this 52-work touring exhibition (Rome → Seoul). — Medium: This is the 'only' Monet painting held by the Detroit Institute of Arts, confirmed on the DIA's official collection page and in various press reports. The press materials for the Rome Ara Pacis exhibition introduce Monet as a representative artist of the Impressionism section but do not specify the particular work by title. Since this is the DIA's sole Monet, the likelihood that it is the exhibited work is very high. The final selection can be confirmed in the official catalogue and gallery labels of the Seoul exhibition.
This painting was shown at the third Impressionist group exhibition of 1877 as 'Corbeille de fleurs,' and around that time the label 'Impressionists' was adopted. — Medium: DIA-related pages and research summaries explain that this painting was shown at the third group exhibition of 1877 as 'Corbeille de fleurs' and that the participating artists adopted the label 'Impressionists' around then. The word 'Impressionism' itself, however, is generally said to derive from criticism just after the first exhibition of 1874, and this guide's account of '1877 official adoption' follows the DIA's commentary. The original text of the exhibition catalogue of the time can be further checked in official catalogues and the like.

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