The Collection Drawings

INFLUENCERS

Manet & Monet: Elegance & Influence
Édouard Manet
January 23, 1832 – April 30, 1883 was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

His Circle and Times

The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these works was seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works Manet copied or used as source material. His work is considered 'early modern', partially because of the black outlining of figures, which draws attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint. He became friends with the impressionists Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro, through another painter, Berthe Morisot, who was a member of the group and drew him into their activities. The grand niece of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Morisot's paintings first had been accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864 and she continued to show in the salon for ten years.
Manet became the friend and colleague of Berthe Morisot in 1868. She is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting, which she had been practicing since she had been introduced to it by another friend of hers, Camille Corot. They had a reciprocating relationship and Manet incorporated some of her techniques into his paintings. In 1874, she become his sister-in-law when she married his brother, Eugene.
Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it in favor of independent
exhibitions. Nevertheless, when Manet was excluded from the International exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried that he would waste all his inheritance on this project, which was enormously expensive. While the exhibition earned poor reviews from the major critics, it also provided his first contacts with several future Impressionist painters, including Degas.
Although his own work influenced and anticipated the Impressionist style, he resisted involvement in Impressionist exhibitions, partly because he did not wish to be seen as the representative of a group identity, and partly because he preferred to exhibit at the Salon. Eva Gonzalès was his only formal student.
He was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Monet and Morisot. Their influence is seen in Manet's use of lighter colors, but he retained his distinctive use of black, uncharacteristic of Impressionist painting. He painted many outdoor (plein air) pieces, but always returned to what he considered the serious work of the studio.
Throughout his life, although resisted by art critics, Manet could number as his champions Émile Zola, who supported him publicly in the press, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Charles Baudelaire, who challenged him to depict life as it was. Manet, in turn, drew or painted each of them.

Women in his time

Manet painted the condition and plight of the rural women of his day. They were the first the be left out of any social reforms addressed in the larger cities. Occasionally, though, these lower-class women found outlets for their voices. One of the most prominent and revolutionary factions were the Saint-Simonians. "All for the improvement of the most numerous and poorest class" served as the motto of the Globe, the group's official newspaper, and this was hardly an overstatement. Led by Father Enfantin and Monsieur Bazard, the Saint-Simonians were committed to remedying social evils, primarily through improving the situation of the impoverished, but also through striving towards gender equality. Added poignancy was provided by the fact that women were directly involved in the movement, and their presence was actually encouraged-- something that did not occur among the Republican organizations of the time. Suzanne Voilquin, who later emerged as a leading feminist and social critic, was a hat-maker's daughter who worked as an embroiderer; other members such as Madame Bazard, Aglae Saint-Hilaire, and Cecile Fournel, provided an alternative image to that of frivolous salonnières concerning solely with society. Newspapers provided the major forum for expression their perspective. Women were heavily involved in this as well, and the logical extension were publications such as the Femme nouvelle and the Tribune des femmes, both of which consisted of writings from women like Voilquin. They were immortalized by her as "our poor little papers, created and continued by proletarian women deprived of fortune, social standing, and an elementary education to light our path." They contained impassioned pleas for equal access to education, an improvement in factory conditions, and numerous other related issues that concerned the Saint-Simonians as a unit.

The Saint-Simonians drew heavily on Biblical text for the social views. Indefinite progress was their mantra, which was in turn linked to a notion of God-given liberty for all people. Therefore, the poor classes required assistance because their financial situation suppressed them so greatly. Inextricable overlap between social, economic, and moral principles was key to their doctrine. Even their belief in equal rights for women was founded on religious grounds. Father Enfantin himself was quoted as proclaiming, "Women, like us, you are in God! Thus it is your right to be free! Show yourselves, make yourselves known, we will respect your words and your acts." Through the means of the Saint-Simonian group, many working-class women did just that.

Claude Monet

Claude Monet also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926)[1] was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

Monet was born to Adolphe and Louise Justine Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians, of 90 Rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, but his family moved in 1845 to Le Havre in Normandy when he was five. He was christened as Oscar-Claude at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. His father wanted him to go into the family (grocery store) business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
On the first of April 1851 Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-Francois Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857, he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet en plein air (outdoor) techniques for painting.
On 28 January 1857 his mother died. Now 16 years old, he left school and his widowed, childless aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre took him into her home.
When Monet traveled to Paris to visit The Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Monet, having brought his paints and other tools with him, would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.
In June of 1861 Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for two years of a seven-year commitment, but upon his contracting typhoid his aunt Madame Lecadre intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at a university. It is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at universities, in 1862 Monet was a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
Monet's 1866 Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte), which brought him recognition, was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux. Shortly thereafter Doncieux became pregnant and bore their first child, Jean. In 1868, due to financial reasons, Monet attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870 - 1871), Monet took refuge in England. While there he studied the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color. In 1870, Monet and Doncieux married and in 1873 moved into a house in Argenteuil near the Seine River. They had another son, Michel, on March 17, 1878. Madame Monet died of tuberculosis in 1879.
Alice Hoschedé decided to help Monet by bringing up his two children together with her own. They lived in Poissy. In April 1883 they moved to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Haute-Normandie, where he planted a large garden which he painted for the rest of his life. Monet and Alice Hoschedé married in 1892.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet began "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel in 1891. He later produced series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, poplars, the Houses of Parliament, mornings on the Seine, and the waterlilies on his property at Giverny.
Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own garden in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine.

Between 1883 and 1908, Monet traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, such as Bordighera. He painted an important series of paintings in Venice, Italy, and in London he painted two important series - views of Parliament and views of Charing Cross Bridge. His wife Alice died in 1911 and his son Jean died in 1914.

Writing by Suleyman Cooke