#44 - All about Claude Monet

2024 is the 150th anniversary of Impressionism – an art movement which began in France, and one of the key figures of the movement was Claude Monet, one of the most celebrated artists of all time and a household name today.

So today, we’re going to have a potted history of the artist, talk about his beautiful home and garden in Normandy, and discover what he was like as a person…

This is a tale of dogged determination and self-belief, of overcoming the odds and challenging conventions.

We'll share fascinating facts, anedcotes about Monet and how he went from being a teenager called Oscar, selling charcoal caricatures for a few pennies to one of the highest paid artists in his lifetime

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Podcast 44 Transcript

All about Claude Monet

Janine: Bonjour and welcome to The Good Life France podcast! I’m your host Janine Marsh, I was born in London but now live in France, in the far north, a department called Pas-de-Calais the tip of which is just 21 miles from the coast of England! I’m a writer with 4 books in the shops so far, I’m the editor of The Good Life France Magazine – the world’s no. 1 independent English language magazine about France, and I’m also editor of The Good Life France website. I think it’s fair to say I’m a bit obsessed with writing and France! I travel year-round exploring French destinations, history, culture, art and gastronomy and I love to share my discoveries with you alongside my podcast partner Olivier Jauffrit.

Oli: Bonjour tout le monde, yes indeed, a great big welcome. I’m Olivier, but you can call me Oli – all my friends do! I’m French, though I have a bit of a British accent after living in the UK for 20 years, now I’m living and working in Lyon where I’m a radio presenter – the drive time slot! And yes I love to chat to you too on this podcast! But, enough about us – Janine what’s today’s topic. – please tell us!

Janine: Well this year is the 150 th anniversary of Impressionism – an art movement which began in France, and one of the key figures of the movement was Claude Monet, one of the most celebrated artists of all time and a household name today. So today, we’re going to have a potted history of the artist, talk about his beautiful home and garden in Normandy, and discover what he was like as a person… This is a tale of dogged determination and self-belief, of overcoming the odds and challenging conventions. We'll share fascinating facts, anedcotes about Monet and how he went from being a teenager called Oscar, selling charcoal caricatures for a few pennies to one of the highest paid artists in his lifetime.

Oli: Who doesn’t love Monet’s paintings, I mean, he’s one of the most popular artists in the world almost a century after he died.

Oli: Oscar-Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris, in rue Lafitte in the 9th arrondissement – an arrondissement is how the city names its districts – 1-20. But when he was just a little boy, he moved to the port city of Le Havre in Normandy.

Janine: As a child, Claude Monet (the Oscar bit was dropped as he grew older), drew cartoons on his school books which made his dad angry. In fact young Claude even made a bit of money drawing caricatures with charcoal, then he signed them O. Monet. Imagine going through your great, great aunt’s treasures hidden away in the loft and coming across a drawing by O. Monet – if you go to flea markets in France – keep an eye out! Anyway his dad still wasn’t happy even though teenaged Claude was earning a bit of money at his art. He didn’t want his son to be an artist – he wanted him to take over the family grocery business, but luckily his mum supported him. Imagine if she hadn’t and Monet senior had succeeded in making little Claude decide to be a greengrocer instead – follow your dreams is the motto of that story.

Oli: Yes indeed sometimes we have to wait a bit longer to follow our dreams but little Claude started studying at art school when he was just eleven years old thanks to his mum. She died in 1857 when he was 16 years old, and Monet left home and returned to Paris to live with his aunt and continue studying art. In 1861 he was drafted into the French army. He was sent to Algeria and was supposed to be in the army for 7 years. His dad, who was quite wealthy said he would buy him out of the army - which you could do in those days – but only if Claude would give up his silly ideas of painting and work in the grocery business. Monet refused. He then caught typhoid and again, luckily for him his aunt could afford to pay for him to be released – and she insisted he carry on with his art studies at university.

Janine: Monet wasn’t impressed by his teachers. In those days to be a success you had to follow rules of painting, formulas featuring ancient Greek and Roman scenes. Monet didn’t want to paint like everyone else though he was very good at the then conventional style of painting landscapes and portraits – nothing like the art we have come to know him for. He frequently went to Normandy to paint the scenery, especially in Honfleur. Here he fell in love with painting outside, en plein air it was called, painting from life as it appeared before you.

Oli: At that time, an artist made his name by exhibiting at official salons run by official art academies, and artists generally sold their paintings through them. Monet wasn’t a massive success and rejection by the academies was frequent, though he did have some of his conventional paintings accepted. But earning a living from painting was hard, he was constantly broke. Some of his paintings were of his lover Camille. They had their first child, Jean in 1867. It wasn’t an easy life, they weren’t married, they were poor, they survived by borrowing money from friends and the occasional painting job. At one point Monet even went home to live with his father who gave him a small allowance. Even though he wasn’t a modest man and believed himself to be very talented, things got so bad that Monet decided to end it all and jumped off a bridge into the Seine in 1868.

Janine: How astonished would he be to know how much his art sells for now? When his father died in 1871 Monet didn’t even go to his funeral. By then he was living in London to avoid being sent back to join the army. After that he moved to Amsterdam. All the time he constantly painted – developing his own style, challenging the traditions of the art world. His dad, despite his unhappiness with Monet’s lifestyle, left him money in his will, and eventually Monet and Camille who was now his wife, they finally got married in 1870, moved back to France. He bought a house in Picardy, not far from Paris, and he bought a boat on the river Seine and used it as a studio – he loved to paint the reflection of light bouncing off the water and the impressionistic style of painting became more and more important to him.

Oli: His new style of painting was completely unacceptable to the art salons of France. Painting after painting was rejected. And Monet wasn’t alone. This was also happening to Renoir, Cezanne, Degas and other artists who developed their own styles that didn’t follow convention. Frustrated by the rejection, a group of artists held their own exhibition – the year was 1874.

Janine: A total 165 works were shown; around 3,500 people paid 60 francs each to see the exhibition – but Monet’s painting which he named “soleil levant: Impression in French, in English: Impression: Sunrise (it was priced at 1,000 francs, about 2000 euros or 2,200 dollars in today’s money) did not sell. A critic named Louis Leroy commented sarcastically that the painting was like an unfinished sketch, just an impression, impressionistic even. The name impressionist stuck, and a new school of art was born but it took several more years to become a success.

I wonder what he would think of the fact that his paintings now sell for a small fortune? One called Haystacks sold for $110.7 million in 2019, and lily paintings sell for more than 80 million dollars. It’s known that he created more than 2,500 pieces of art – paintings, pastels, and sketches – so as I said, keep your eyes peeled when you’re at a flea market in France – you never know!

Oli: Well, two years after that first exhibition, Camille was diagnosed with TB, and she became much sicker after their second son, Michel was born in 1878, and she died shortly after. Monet sat at her bedside and painted a final portrait, he later admitted that he was horrified at himself that despite being distressed, he was automatically noting the individual colours on her dead face (you can see the painting in the Musée d’Orsay).

Janine: Living with the Monet family at the time was a woman called Alice Hoschedé, the wife of a businessman and art collector who had gone bankrupt and run off. It seems that Monet may have started an affair with her before Camille died – and the fact that she destroyed all the photos of his former wife seems to indicate she was jealous. She had six kids (it’s said one of them was Monet’s) and they all carried on living with Monet and his two kids. They married in 1892 when her husband died.

Oli: But before that happened, something that would change Monet’s life took place. Travelling by train in 1883 to Paris, the track ran along the bottom of a garden through the little village of Giverny in Normandy where Monet spotted a house that he really liked the look of and went to have a look. In May 1883, he signed a rental agreement for the house.

Janine: There were orchards, a garden and a barn where Monet could paint. There was a school for the children, and the surrounding countryside offered a variety of beautiful scenery to paint. Things started to get better. Monet’s paintings began to sell and by 1890 he had earned enough to buy the house outright build a new art studio, extend the gardens and add a greenhouse. Monet became passionate about the gardens, creating scenes he wanted to paint. He would write daily instructions to a team of seven gardeners about the design, planting layouts and purchasing of new plants – roses poppies, apple trees – they turned it into his dream of a garden, bright colours like a living paint palette.

Oli: Ten years later a water meadow the other side of the train track at the bottom of the garden came up for sale and Monet bought it. There’s a road there now – no rail track. The artist threw himself into landscaping that area too, including the creation of the lily ponds which he would spend the last two decades of his life painting. He’d seen water lilies at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle – a world fair. Displayed in water gardens outside the Trocadèro, garden company Latour took first prize in the flower competition.

Janine: It was pure serendipity that Monet was exhibiting in the Pavillon des Artistes next door to the Trocadèro. He was totally beguiled by the waterlilies. “I love water, but I also love flowers. That’s why, once the pond was filled, I thought about adorning it with plants. I got a catalogue and simply chose at random”, he said. Latour, based in Le Temple-sur-Lot in the Lot-et-Garonne department (between Bordeaux and Toulouse) are still going strong with their water lilies and they kept the orders from Monet. Well you would wouldn’t you! There’s an article coming up about this amazing garden centre in the summer issue of The Good Life France Magazine which is free (just hop onto www.magazine.thegoodlifefrance.com to subscribe for free).

Monet adored his waterlilies. One of his gardener’s jobs was to paddle a boat onto the pond each morning, washing and dusting each lily pad. Once the lilies were clean, Monet began painting them, trying to capture what he saw as the light reflected off the water. Actually the gardeners who work there today still clean the lily leaves, you often spot them in their little wooden boat!

Oli: He put a Japanese footbridge across his pond, which he famously painted green, a colour now known as Monet green. He was very into Japanese art as were many artists of the time including Van Gogh. Monet’s house was full of Japanese prints. The local city council told him to remove the water lilies, they were scared that the foreign plants would poison the water, Monet ignored them. He was obsessed.

Janine: He was also his own harshest critic. By the late 1800s, his work was selling well. He eventually became one of the highest paid artists in his lifetime. In 1908, a show of his work in Paris had to be postponed after he took a knife to at least 15 of his water lily paintings. His friend and former French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau told a journalist in 1927, “Monet would attack his canvases when he was angry. And his anger was born of a dissatisfaction with his work…he destroyed canvases in his quest for perfection.” Clemenceau was very much in awe of Monet and pulled strings in order to ensure that his tobacco, coal, or petrol supplies would not be disrupted during war.

Oli: Monet’s wife Alice had died in 1911, and his oldest son Jean died in 1914, leaving Alice’s daughter Blanche who had married Monet’s son Jean, her stepbrother, to look after the ageing artist as his vision failed. Blanche was also a painter.

Janine: Monet got cataracts when he was in his 70s which affected his painting style enormously but he carried on painting and the day after the Armisitice of November 11, 1918, he offered the French State a series of enormous water lily paintings as a symbol of peace. They were installed according to his plan at the Orangerie Museum in Paris in a room he specially designed for them, though he never got to see this as he died a few months before.

Oli: He delayed risky cataract surgery and by 1922 he was classified legally blind. In 1923 he had surgery which restored the sight in his right eye. He refused to have surgery on his left eye and used special glasses with green lenses in order to start painting again. He even went over some of his pre-surgery works, making them more vivid, and often intensifying the shades of blue, though many of his works he destroyed, it’s thought up to 500 paintings in total.

Janine: When, in the summer of 1926, Monet was diagnosed with lung cancer. Georges Clemenceau, wrote to him, “What more could one ask for? You’ve had the best life that a man could dream of. There’s an art to leaving as well as entering.” Monet died on December 5, 1926, at home, aged 86. Clemenceau refused to see him covered with a black cloth and replaced it with colourful, flowery curtains…

Oli: He was buried in Giverny churchyard. He died intestate, and his surviving son Michel inherited his entire estate. Michael didn’t have any children, and on his death in 1966, bequeathed the house and the gardens to the French Academy of Fine Arts. Over the years it has been restored, and in 1980, Monet’s former home was opened to tourists. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people visit Giverny to walk through the artist’s famous garden and visit his house.

Janine: Monet lovingly decorated his house, choosing vivid hues to brighten the rooms, hanging Japanese prints on the walls throughout. There’s an airy, blue and white kitchen which looks onto a terrace where Monet welcomed guests on fine days. His dining room was painted sunshine yellow, a really bright yellow a colour that spawned thousands of copycat kitchen/dining rooms around France. In fact at one point it was the most popular colour for French kitchens. When I bought my old farmhouse in northern France, the kitchen was Monet yellow. I’ve kept it yellow but a bit more of a mellow tone, that bright colour was a bit much in the morning for me!

Oli: Monet’s team of gardeners grew a wide variety of aromatic Mediterranean herbs and vegetables, including rosemary, mint, courgettes, tomatoes and asparagus. He kept chickens in the garden – and in fact there are still chickens there – not the same ones of course!

Monet was a bit of a foodie. He loved Périgord truffles and foie gras from Alsace. He loved lobster, fish and duck and garlicky mushrooms – all washed down with a good Sancerre from the Loire Valley.

Janine: Visit the garden today and it looks not unlike it did in Monet’s lifetime. These days there is a team of eight gardeners. I spoke to one of the head gardeners there who told me their philosophy is to keep it looking as it did after Monet’s 45 years of gardening there. And it really is recognisable from his paintings. What’s grown in the garden is chosen from a list of plants Monet liked to grow. Much of the detail comes from a book written by Monet’s son about his father’s letters which contained information about the plants he loved. And, there have been lots of studies of his paintings to work out which varieties he featured. The gardener told me that Alice, Monet’s wife wasn’t always happy with the garden. She wanted it to be neater and she wanted him to chop down trees she thought were too close to the house, but he refused. I think he liked to have his own way!

Oli: Monet captured his garden on canvas over and over. He would paint a section in the morning, paint it again at noon and again later in the day, fascinated by the change in colour. In those days paint didn’t come in tubes ready to use, artists mixed their own pigments. Monet would be mixing several times a day in his workshop, trying to get the colours as he saw them.

Janine: As you stroll the garden paths, birds sing, bees and insects flit about and always, there’s the aroma of blooming flowers. The famous “paint boxes”, oblong plots filled with flowers that the gardeners plant up to look like a palette of colours are spellbinding. You can easily imagine Monet using these beds to help him create the colours for his paint box.

Oli: “I must have flowers, always, and always” said Monet, and his legacy lives on in beautiful abundance in Giverny.

And now it’s time for a reader’s question…

Oli: So Janine, what is today’s question about – cheese, Napoleon, music, cake, art? Something else?

Janine: It’s something else entirely today Oli! Today’s question is from Fiona Tempton of Elgin in Scotland! She says “When I was in France for my holiday recently, I noticed that a lot of car number plates have a number on the right hand side after the registration details – what does the numbers mean?” So Oli, over to you for that one!

Oli: Well the registration plates in France include a regional logo and a department number on the right hand side. Every department in France has a number, Pas-de-Calais is 62 for instance, Paris has it’s own number – 75. You can choose any department number, you don’t have to live there. And the car keeps that number forever – even if you sell it on, the person buying can’t change that number. And did you know that plate numbers in France are issued sequentially, and stay with the car for the whole of its life - you cannot have a custom plate number like you can in the UK or the US or other countries.

Janine: I can imagine PAR15 would be popular if you could as it looks like Paris! And did you know that it was the French who invented number plates? As far back as 1783, before the French Revolution, King Louis XVI ordered Parisian coachmen to have a badge with their name and address on their carriages. This was part of an effort to reduce crime in the streets of Paris. This morphed into the car number plate system! France was the first country to introduce the registration plate with the enactment of the Paris Police Ordinance on 14 August 1893.

Oli: Thanks so much for that question Fiona! If anyone has a question for us – feel free to send it to janine@thegoodlifefrance.com or via our podcast newsletter. And, if there’s a topic you want to know more about – let us know!

Janine: We hope you enjoyed this Claude Monet episode – and we made a good impression on you (oh dear, terrible pun!).

Oli: Thank you so much, a massive merci beaucoup, to everyone for listening to our podcast nearly 150 countries all around the world! And a massive thank you for sharing the podcast with your friends and family, we’re truly grateful when you do that. You’ve been listening to Janine Marsh and me Olivier Jauffrit. You can find me at parischanson.fr

Janine: And you can find me and heaps of information about France – where to visit, culture, history, recipes – everything France - at thegoodlifefrance.com where you can subscribe to the podcast, my weekly newsletter about France and our totally brilliant, totally free magazine which you can read at magazine.thegoodlifefrance.com

But for now, it’s au revoir from me.

Olivier: And goodbye from me.

Janine: Speak to you soon!

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#44 - All about Claude Monet

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