Tour: Claude Monet: The Series Paintings
Overview

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In the 1880s, many of the painters who had helped to forge impressionism became dissatisfied with it. Pissarro experimented with neoimpressionism. Renoir went to Italy, where he was inspired by the works of Raphael to adopt a more classical style. And Monet began to explore the same subject repeatedly in what are known today as his “series” paintings: grainstacks, poplar trees, Rouen cathedral, and other subjects, some near his home, others in England, Norway, and Italy. Finally, in the last decades of his life, Monet settled in to devote his entire attention to the lily pond he constructed in his garden at Giverny.

The series pictures diverged from impressionism in important ways. Though Monet began them in front of his subject—often working on several canvases simultaneously—he spent many long hours reworking them in his studio, sometimes over a period of years. “The further I go,” he wrote, “the better I see that it takes a great deal of work to succeed in rendering what I want to render: ‘instantaneity,’ above all the enveloppe, the same light spread over everything, and I'm more than ever disgusted at things that come easily, at the first attempt.”

The enveloppe that attracted Monet was the air itself, the unifying atmosphere that lay between him and his subject. As a younger man he had sought to capture the visual effects of light and weather by painting quickly and directly out of doors, but now he pursued the most ephemeral effects slowly and with deliberation. The relationship between subject and painting evolved. He explored color and light as more purely artistic concerns and increasingly sought internal, pictorial unity—not only in each painting but in each series as a whole. Harmonizing colors and textures allowed him to elaborate his original response to a scene and to explore the effects of mood produced by differing light and color.

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