Praeterita

After writing a 1,000 word piece about Winslow Homer's eighteen month stay at an English fishing village, I'm writing a series of primers about other artists who made similar journeys. Claude Monet, Regates a Saint-Adresse , 1867 Who Claude Monet, French Impressionist painter Coastal association Normandy, France. Reasons for visiting Monet spent his childhood in Le Havre, Normandy. Dates visited Almost his entire life from 1840 to 1926. First visit 1845, aged 5, when his family moved to Le Havre. As an adult, after working and gaining some success in Paris, he spent the summer of 1867 painting in Sainte-Adresse, near Le Havre. Effect on Work His earliest plein air paintings were made near Le Havre when Monet was 16, under the guidance of Eugene Boudin. Ten years later, Monet's time at Sainte Adresse moved his work away from 'salon' style subjects of bourgeois life to a deeper consideration of how to use pure colour to capture the light on ...

L-R: Flaubert, Monet, Manet, Pissarro I’m reading Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education” for at least the third time, at the same time as I’m reading a book called “ The Private Lives of the Impressionists ”, which is a very readable and well-researched account of the relationships between Manet, Monet, Pissaro, et al. So my head is filled with the people and the material reality of Paris from the 1840s to the 1870s. Both books are so vivid in their recreation of a specific time and place that it has the effect of making mid-nineteenth century Paris seem at times more real than the time in which I actually live. The second book is a mild antidote to the first, too. Flaubert’s book is a mercilessly ironic dissection of a bourgeois society obsessed with accumulation, pleasure and power, the exaltation of the personal whim above altruism, and a restless desire for sensation which renders everything sour and dissatisfying as soon as it is achieved. The education of the emotions (“sentimen...