"Monet: The Early Years" at San Francisco Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum

The forever popular French impressionist painter Claude Monet made his somewhat unusual appearance in San Francisco Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum, in an exhibition titled Monet: The Early Years (February 25, 2017 through May 29, 2017), featuring his mostly engaging early paintings, some of them were already in the realm of later famed impressionism.

The first piece or pieces to greet the audience amazed us by the unusual shape of the wok(s). The ensemble had two framed pieces of different sizes, cut from the same and much larger painting. The square one on the right side, centering on two seated people at a picnic, was collected by Musée d'Orsay in Paris, titled 'Luncheon on the Grass, Central Panel' (1865–66), while the slender and tall panel on the left side, featuring back view of three people at the perimeter of the picnic, hailed from a private collection. What a fascinating family reunion. I also wondered where the "right" panel might be.



The rest of the exhibition was organized in chronological order, well suited to demonstrate the development of Monet as an artist. Here, I will largely follow this arrangement, with some re-grouping according to subject matters.

In the first room, we saw some landscapes, and one can see their affinity to the works by early French greats such as Corot, and Courbet. These landscape were much weightier and earthier than his more celebrated later pieces.


The Pointe de La Hève at Low Tide, 1865. Oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas



Next were some winter scenes, a genre quite different from typical impressionism works closely associated with often colorful domains under joyous and sunshine. However, even in winter, the shifting lights were clearly a main contributing factor to the sense of drama, though somewhat subdued.


A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur (1865), Musée d’Orsay




The Magpie (1869), Musée d’Orsay

There were some paintings depicting scenes in cities, painted while Monet visited the Netherlands and UK, and those works had similar characteristics of his early landscapes.



But, some of the brushstrokes Monet employed had become noticeably looser and more fluid.


Hyde Park, 1871, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence




The Pont Neuf in Paris (1871), Dallas Museum of Art

With water, Monet had his most solid footing, and the results were dynamic and engrossing. Immersed in a room full of such paintings, one felt the strong need to hold breath, in case the splashing water entered one's lungs.




The Green Wave. (1886) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York





One of my favorite pieces in this show was the "Fishing Boat" below, which was rich in texture and subtle in tonal variances, and almost reached the state of abstract, which caused its rejection by an exhibiting salon, yet a virtue in the later era.


Fishing Boats

Monet's water scenes with people was always very interesting, especially the way he portrayed the slight melancholy, and the endlessly shifting patterns of water. His ability to depict still or slightly rippled water bodies was astounding, despite the fact that such way of painting had inevitably lost its novelty.




On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868)




On the Beach in Trouville



Monet didn't frequently paint people as pure portraits — most of his people were immersed in outdoor or indoor settings, and became part of the fabrics — a few such pure portraits from his early period were included in the show, and I was very taken in by a portrait of Camille Monet, who stood in snow, in her bright red shawl, turned her upper torso slightly, and timidly or inquisitively peered into the closed French door. An intriguing scene, worthy of Chekhov or Ibsen.


The Red Kerchief: Portrait of Camille Monet (ca. 1868-1873), Cleveland Museum of Art 


The Cradle—Camille with the Artist’s Son Jean (1867, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)


Jean Monet Sleeping (1867–1868, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)



There were also some still life paintings in the exhibit, probably as answers to friendly challenges lobbed from some accomplished painters. Or rainy day consolations for the sun-obsessed Monet.




Still Life with Melon (1872, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon)


Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- My Favorite Paintings at Musée Marmottan Monet
- My Favorite Paintings at Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
- My Favorite Paintings from Musée d'Orsay, Paris
- My Favorite Paintings from Musée Picasso, Paris
- My Favorite Artworks at Musée National Eugène Delacroix, Paris
- Impressionism from National Gallery of Art (DC) in San Francisco
- Last Call - "The Girl With A Pearl Earring" in De Young Museum, San Francisco
- Modernism from the National Gallery of Art in De Young Museum, San Francisco

My Favorite Paintings at Musée Marmottan Monet

My 2008 trip to Paris brought me to the presence of more Monets, first at Musée de l'Orangerie, where his enormous Les Nymphéas filled two huge oval halls, then to Musée Marmottan Monet, which hosted his painting given the name to the Impressionism movement, Impression, Soleil levant, indeed a shimmering and muted vibrant painting of the gentle sunrise in a sea port.  The exhibition of the painting in that group show was mocked by the Parisian audience then and the group was branded as Impressionists, which quickly took hold of the people's imaginary and nowadays, almost any Impressionism show is a blockbuster event and people can related to Impressionism much more easily than to Titian or Raphael. How people's perceptions have been conditioned!  It was indeed a glorious painting but it didn't make into my top two favorites in this modestly-sized but very rich museum.

My favorite painting in that museum was a portrait by Edouard Manet, who was at the fringe of the Impressionists group and an odd man due to his somber palette and classical restraints of his portraits amongst the sunburst colors and free-forms of the others, and I loved him more for that precisely.  Here, his Portrait of Berthe Morisot, an artist in her own rights, presented us a confident woman who was somber, sensual, intelligent and serious, and not unaware of her own monumental yet feminine allure.  I love the way Manet applied his large swatches of paints to create flat areas confined in its clearly defined boundaries, such as the sitter's face and left hand - each of these areas glittered like the reflection of moon in dark water, surrounded by her "colorful" and singing black dress, and further accentuated by the dark brown flat background.  Simplistic, stylish and stirringly beautiful.


Portrait de Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet

My second favorite was a well-known painting by Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Paris Street, Rainy Day).  Caillebotte made several versions of this work, and this one was more prosaic, more "impressionistic", less polished and less plastic than, say the one in Art Institute of Chicago, and had more earthy vitality, despite the fact that the subjects here were the sophisticated urban Paris and Parisians. I especially loved the exaggerated, plunging perspective of this work, and the perfectly captured varied postures of the pedestrians in the rain, and the central character's almost black face but for several suggestive strokes giving him many background stories for the viewers to fill in. A melancholic yet witty masterpiece.  Unforgettable.


Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 1877, Gustave Caillebotte

My Favorite Museum Collection Series

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List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited