Monet Prints

Struggling for xmas presents for a loved one? Well, why not try a Claude Monet print for an idea?! Monet is very popular around the world, and his art generally goes down very well as a gift. His natural impressionist style is not too abstract, and not too traditional, making it a great choice. Those who like art but do not follow it so much often prefer prints rather than handmade oil paintings, and we include some of the best below. Art provider Art.com is a company that we have used on MANY occasionsand, to be honest, we have never really had a reason to use anybody else.

Art.com’s service and quality of product is what we appreciate and so feel comfortable displaying their name in this blog. They also have some great prices on prints in time for xmas! At the time we’re in, it really is great to save a little monet here and there!! (Sorry for that pun). Ok, so no more nonsense, just check out the great prints below and click through to see each and their latest prices.

At the time of going to press all products across the whole site are offered at 30% OFF so don’t delay!

Madame Monet and Her Son

Claude Monet

Pont Japonais

The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil

Water Lilies, 1916

Chemin dans les Bles a Pourville

Water Lilies

Stiller Winkel im Garten von Montgeron

Garden at Giverny

The Japanese Bridge

Water Lilies

Argenteuil

La Pie, Effet de Neige

Spring in Giverny, 1890

Sunflowers, c.1881

Bassin d’Argenteuil, c.1874

Impression, Sunrise

London Houses of Parliament

Monet Painting in His Garden

Boulevard des Capucines

Morning at Etretat, c.1883

Impression, Sunrise, c.1893

The Basin at Argenteuil

Claude Monet Paintings

Check out Vault Oil Paintings, who have some highly trained artists, and have provided us with some beautiful oil paintings in recent months, which proudly adorn our office walls!!

Check this link here for specific Monet Paintings, though they offer a large number of other artists too – check their site for more info. We haven’t ordered anything from other artists, so can’t comment on that, but certainly we are happy to recommend them for the Monet paintings that we’ve ordered up to now.

We have used them for Poppies Blooming, and several versions of Monet’s Water Lilies series.

Monet’s Japanese Bridge over the Lily Pond

Monet’s Japanese Bridge over the Lily Pond is one of his most famous paintings from a truly supreme career.

From July 1899, Monet painted the Japanese bridge, the construction of which followed years of enthusiasm for Japanese culture. (Numerous woodcuts adorning Monet’s house in Giverny also bear witness to this).

Monet moved the Japanese bridge around in different paintings across his series. Some would enable the viewer to gaze more steadily on the surface on the lily pond, which soon became an obsession for Monet.

Monet would also show much vegetation along the banks of the pond as if he wanted to show first the real nature that would later only feature in the reflection on the water.

The water lilies lie on the water like a carpet. In a masterly management and control of perspective, Monet paints the elliptical plants receding into the background.

Much of the content from this article was taken from Monet – Art in Focus, PP81.

See also the blog about Monet’s Bridge over the Lily Pond.

Claude Monet – BBC Historic Figures – Monet Biography

Claude Monet Biography taken from BBC History article.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) – Monet was a French artist, the leading member of the Impressionist group of painters.

Claude-Oscar Monet was born in Paris but spent his childhood in Le Havre, where his father was a merchant. There he met a local artist, Eugène Boudin, who encourage him to become a landscape painter.

In 1859, Monet went to Paris to study at the Académie Suisse, where he became close friends with a fellow student, Camille Pissarro. Between 1860 and 1862 Monet was in Algeria as a conscript. He returned to Paris where he met most of the major artists of the era including Renoir, Cézanne, Whistler and Manet.

In 1870, Monet married Camille Doncieux, who had already borne his son. To escape the Franco-Prussian war, the family moved to London. After their return to France they settled at Argenteuil, a boating centre on the Seine which drew many other Impressionist painters. Working from nature was a particular hallmark of the Impressionist movement, and one that Monet embraced, reflecting in his paintings the ever-changing impact of light and weather conditions.

In 1872, he visited Le Havre where he painted ‘An Impression, Sunrise’. When exhibited in 1874 part of its title was used derisively by a critic to label the whole movement ‘Impressionism’. This exhibition is now known as the First Impressionist Exhibition.

Monet’s wife died in 1879, and he set up home with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of one of his most important patrons, and their respective children. During the 1880s, Monet travelled through France painting a variety of landscapes. He gradually became better known and for the last 30 years of his life he was regarded as the greatest of the Impressionists.

From about 1890 he began to paint series of pictures of one subject, including ‘Haystacks’, ‘Rouen Cathedral’ and ‘Waterlilies’. The latter were painted in the elaborate garden Monet created at his house at Giverny, a property north-west of Paris where he lived from 1883. He painted them over and over again, most significantly in a series commissioned for the Orangerie des Tuileries, a museum in Paris.

Monet died at Giverny on 5 December 1926.

Impressionism: Monet, Manet, and other Impressionists

Claude Monet / Edouard Manet Impressionism article – taken from EmptyEasel.com.

The term Impressionism (or Impressionist) is a rather popular word in art circles—sometimes it seems that once a painting is labelled as having an Impressionist style, it has an extra air of appeal about it that it didn’t before.

But even though the word itself may have become a catch-phrase, it does have a specific meaning; so for those of you who aren’t completely sure what Impressionism is all about, read on.

Impressionism began in Paris in the mid-1800s as a sort of counter- movement to traditional painting techniques.

Most artists of that time period painted from models or still life reference inside studios, with every item perfectly arranged and lighted for the best effect.

But the artists who would become known as the Impressionists (including Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro) looked at art a little differently—they wanted to make art as truly realistic as possible, with brighter colors and more natural settings.

Another leading Impressionist was Edouard Manet. After one of his paintings was rejected from the Salon de Paris in 1863 (which was the premiere art show in Paris) he came in contact with several other French Impressionists at the Salon de Refusés (where all the rejected artwork was put on display that year.)

Once united, Monet, Manet, and the other Impressionists found similarities in their approach to art. They all began painting almost exclusively outdoors, which led directly to the distinctive characteristics of Impressionism that we’re so used to seeing.

(And also gave us the term plein air that we still use today.)

Because they painted outside, the Impressionists had less time to mix color and were forced to paint more quickly to keep up with the ever-changing daylight. As a result, their works generally seemed “unpolished” or messy compared to other artists, and were never really accepted by the art critics.

In fact, like the Fauves later on, the Impressionist’s name came from an art critic making fun of one of their paintings: a work by Monet which was entitled Impression: sunrise.

The critic took that word “impression” and used it to downplay the importance of their paintings, as though they hadn’t made a proper study of their subject, and weren’t serious artists.

But the Impressionists knew what they wanted to achieve—they were trying to replicate real life in a more honest way. They knew that the human eye isn’t able to capture an entire scene in perfect detail, so they allowed their paintings to break down at the edges, or wherever there was movement, in order to mimic that.

The Impressionists also understood that light and shadow are seen in glances and moments, and are ever changing. They began to worry less about smooth transitions of color and more about making the color and contrast stand out, to catch the eye like it would in real life.

For artists, if you want to paint in an Impressionist style it’s easy enough. Try using brighter colors and mixing less on your palette. Also, make shorter strokes with your brush, and set a timer to force yourself to paint quicker.

And I suppose, when talking about a painting that looks loosely painted up close, or one with lots of bright colors and short brush strokes; or even a quaint little plein air piece—you might as well go ahead and say it.

“It’s rather Impressionist, isn’t it.”

Contrasting the Work of Cézanne and Monet: Two Unique Paths To Modernism

Claude Monet article – Taken from EmptyEasel.com, and originally from Kimberley’s Blog.

The 20th century not only marked a new beginning in the social, political and economic world, but a time of change in the art world as well. Two revolutionary artists to influence this time period were Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, who each found new ways of representing nature, but differed greatly in style.

As one of the great leaders of the Impressionist art movement in France, Monet studied the ways in which outdoor light plays upon nature. His technique was not meant to be very precise—which makes his images most effective when seen at a distance—yet it is always clear what his paintings are.

Cézanne’s paintings, on the other hand, show early evidence of what would eventually be known as the Cubist art movement (which incidentally developed out of a reaction to Impressionism). Cézanne was like Monet in that he did not present a clear, concise picture of the world, but he was totally different from Monet in how he went about it.

Prime examples of their work

Monet’s oil painting entitled Banks of the Seine, Vetheuil of 1880 is one of the many perfect landscapes he was known for.

Monet wanted to represent a single moment of light and evoke feelings and emotions about the power of Nature. His deliberate division of subjects also leads the eye naturally from one plane to another—he began with detailed concentration on the flowers in the meadow which lead us into the water of the pond, then to the trees and shrubs in the background, and then into the sky above.

Cézanne’s 1904 painting entitled Le Chateau Noir is a landscape as well.

It differs from Monet’s, however, in that Le Chateau is portrayed in an unnatural manner and without a balanced composition. And while Monet used soft, somewhat pastel-like colors, Cézanne preferred bold, dark, contrasting and striking colors to describe his image.

Comparing Monet and Cézanne’s techniques

Monet painted like an Impressionist; the image was carried in his mind before he actually painted it, and is merely suggested to the viewer through a multitude of small, vigorous strokes of pure color. The colors were not intentionally blended (except as one color meets the other on the canvas) and layers of colors were used to produce the painting’s animated effect.

For instance, Monet’s water consists of many, many layered brush strokes of different colors to show how the outdoor light is reflected from its surface.

In contrast, Cézanne used a more mechanical, uniform technique, and even avoided the intimacy of Impressionism by taking a viewpoint far away from the chateau and peeking through the trees at it. (Trees which are quite unlike Monet’s, I might add; very stiff and unnatural, almost like metal.)

And while Monet painted in small, vigorous brush strokes all over his canvas, Cézanne painted with large flat brush strokes and dark lines, sometimes giving his paintings a feeling of disorder, and certainly showing us a glimpse of Cubism with his more basic cube-like shapes.

You could say that Monet was interested in the effect of light on Nature so that he could reveal its pure beauty, while Cézanne was more analytical and calculating, studying Nature to reduce it to its simplest forms.

In the end, Cézanne and Monet both presented inventive and revolutionary ideas of how to capture Nature on canvas—and it was those techniques and philosophies which led the way to Modernism in the art world.

For more information on Paul Cezanne click here.

Claude Monet: Plein Air Painter and Impressionist

Claude Monet article – taken from EmptyEasel.com

Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris. He was especially influential in the Impressionist art movement, and is probably best known for his famous paintings of water lilies and Impressionist Parisian scenes.

Monet first started drawing as a child, doing portraiture and caricatures for spending money. He also painted plein air landscapes as a teenager, before leaving to serve for two years in the military.

When he returned to Paris Monet formed friendships with several other young painters. The Impressionist movement that grew out of those friendships soon became characterized by his (then) peculiar obsession with painting almost entirely outdoors.

You see, most artists of that era spent hours in their studios, working from sketches or posed models, but Monet rarely did.

His paintings were intensely devoted to capturing the play of natural light and shadow on every surface—and he felt that the outdoors provided the best means of doing that.

Monet also challenged the traditional idea of what made a “finished” painting. He and the other Impressionists painted quickly, almost roughly.

In this detail of Monet’s Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor, you can see why art critics ridiculed the early Impressionists’ work.

From their point of view, each figure was merely daubed on—and work like that was considered a sketch, not a true painting.

Most people will look at Monet’s work today and love that “painterly” approach, but for his time it was quite different from traditional paintings.

Like many of the other Impressionists, Monet was also interested in Japanese culture and art, as evidenced in the painting below.

La Japonaise is an interesting departure for him, since it’s obviously set indoors, but even so, Monet still portrays the same sense of movement and looseness that can be seen throughout his plein air pieces.

And in looking at the painting above (among others) it’s obvious that Claude Monet’s adherence to a certain style didn’t keep him from exploring new subjects and ideas.

Even something as simple as a haystack, for instance.

Just like his more famous water lilies, Monet painted several of these haystacks, in different lighting, different seasons, and different weather.

He took a subject that many artists would have passed by just because he was most interested in the image, the way the light landed at a certain time.

In the end, it didn’t matter to Monet whether the light was reflecting off a swirling red Japanese kimono or a simple stack of hay—he knew there was beauty in both.

Claude Monet died in 1926, at the age of 86.

Monet in London – London Paintings by Monet

Monet had returned to London several times since his first stay in 1870/71 without the journeys perceptibly having an effect on his work. It was only in Autumn 1899 that he felt a more positive urge. He and his wife Alice occupied a room in the Savoy Hotel that enjoyed a fairy-tale view of the Thames. It looked upstream towards Charity Cross Bridge, and downstream towards Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament.

Monet began working on three series at once, each based on one of the Thames bridges or Parliament. Bad weather forced him to break off his work and return to France. He only resumed working in 1900 and 1901 during further stays in London, completing them finally in his studio in Giverny in 1904.

85 works were produced, of which Durand-Ruel showed 35 in a sale exhibition that would turn out to be Monet’s greatest success to date. Collectors from the USA, Britain, and increasingly France as well purchased his pictures for extremely high prices, and the more the emphasis the painter made on producing series of pictures, the less value the public seemed to place on pictorial content. They were no longer buying a particular picture, they were buying a Monet.
However the success of Claude Monet’s work did not tempt the painter into a frenzy of mass production. He maintained strict quality expectations of himself and now hesitated ever longer to declare his works finished and show then to the public.

Famous London Monet Paintings

Wateroo Bridge, Mist, 1901-1903

Monet’s subject here was not modern city life, but, as in Rouen, the atmospheric appearance of architecture. The bridge is reduced to a color phenomenon, suggested by a few compositional elements.

Houses of Parliament, The sun breaks through the mist, 1904

Although Monet denied directly being influenced by William Turner, the unbridled colors of the London series show many similarities with Turner’s representations of shimmering light phenomena – see Turner’s Houses of Parliament on Fire, 1835 for reference. In 1904 Monet produced Houses of Parliament, the Sun breaks through the mist. In his time in London Monet stuck to a precisely planned schedule: in the mornings he painted the Thames bridges from his hotel window, in the late afternoon he went to the terrace of St. Thomas’s Hospital, where he got an excellent view of the Houses of Parliament in the evening sun. The particular interplay of light effects and subject matter is intensified here by Monet almost to pathos: the color and brightness contrasts seem symbolically charged.

This article is an exerpt from Monet, Art in Focus, 2005, PP74-75.

Constable & Turner’s influence on Monet

In 1870 Monet fled to London to avoid conscription for the Franco-Prussian War. Whilst in the UK he studied famous British artists such as Turner and Constable before returning to France and settling in Argenteuil with his family.

From 1820, John Constable (1776 – 1837) devoted himself almost entirely to lanscape painting. More than any previous painter, he placed much emphasis on open-air nature studies as part of his work. After visits to Venice and Rome, where he studied the glowing local colos of Italian painting and the works of Claude Lorrain, he devoted himself to his native English lanscapes.

Claiming that painting was only another word for feeling, Constable rejected the traditional lanscape composition in the sense of a lofty idealisation. Instead he studied the constantly changing appearance of nature with almost scientific preserverance, as his countless cloud studies demonstate. However, the great vividness of his pictures may be attributed not just to the subject matter, but also to the lively, occasionally stippled brushwork.

Also, Constable combined, for example, several shades of green to depict the lush green of his fields and foliage, in order to enhance their brightness.

The traditional landscapes of his day lack intensity because only one shade of green was used to depict the whole world of vegetation. As a result of the painting technique, Constable’s oil paintings seem sketchy and, for many viewers, therefore incomplete.

When Monet studied Constable’s works in the London museums, it must have been precisely these “unfinished” fresh and unsentimental landscapes that encouraged him to systematically develop his own spontaneous painting technique.

Turner’s visualisation of natural forces

Sleeping in the philosophy of Romanticism, JMW Turner (1775-1851) did not reproduce landscapes and their atmospheric effects in the naturalistic manner of Constable, but created mystic metaphors, for example about the creation and the cyclical character of natural forces. Appealing to the viewer’s senses, William Turner used colour as a means of expression, to illustrate the conflict between elemental forces, which appear principally in the form of extreme weather conditions.

The artist raised color to the level of an independant element of composition, at the same time liberating it from all concreteness.

Turner’s pictures are not therefore “composed” in traditional detail. Mostly, objects have no outlines and are not placed in the picture according to the law of central perspective.

More often, the frequently dramatic three-dimensional depth of his pictures is developed by strong color gradations and circular or spiral brushstrokes, which generate a certain vortical effect.

Although Monet disliked the English painter for the “effusive Romanticism of his imagination”, in his later works he adopted Turner’s idea of “colored space”.

Admittedly he juxtaposed brighter colors, not mixing them like Turner. In terms of subject matter, both artists shared a commitment to technical progress. In his picture Rain, Steam, Speed, Turner the idealist transfigured nature and technology into an aesthetic homogenity, whereas Monet later showed only their co-operation, but the very choice of contemporary objects was unusual and revolutionary for the young Impressionists.

Taken from “Monet” – Art In Focus, 2005, PP34-35.

See also John Constable & JMW Turner blogs.

Poppies Blooming Claude Monet

Poppies Blooming is a classic oil painting by Claude Monet, the famous French Impressionist artist from the 19th century.

Claude Monet in this painting simply illustrates his wife and son walking along in the blooming poppies of a field in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris.

Read more, or order Poppies Blooming Claude Monet here.