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The Rue Montorgueil in Paris, festival of 30 June 1878

Claude Monet • Painting, 1878, 81×50 cm
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About the artwork
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Urban landscape
Style of art: Impressionism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1878
Size: 81×50 cm
Artwork in selections: 138 selections

Description of the artwork «The Rue Montorgueil in Paris, festival of 30 June 1878»

This painting and her twin, written on a nearby street of Saint-Denis the only Patriotic utterances Monet for the rest of his long life. Where did this passionate Patriotic impulse of the artist, which is always much rather swam somewhere in the middle of the river to look into the water or climbed on the rocks, looking for the best sea view? The artist, who even to the end of the First world war decided to give his country a huge mural of water lilies. For this you need to understand what was happening in Paris at the world exhibition of 1878.

It took 7 years after the other war, Franco-Prussian war, which became a huge national disaster and disgrace for the French war, plunging the country into a deep crisis and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And finally, France mourned the loss and begin to revive. It's time the world to demonstrate great spiritual power of the people, who have overcome postwar hardships. The government announces the world exhibition of agricultural and industrial products and works of fine art.

It was the exhibition, for which was built the great Palace of the Trocadero concert hall and stations, the unique water supply and elevators, and covered all adjacent to the square boulevards electric lamps Yablochkov. This is the exhibition, which showed the head of the Statue of liberty and presented to admiring spectators sewing machine singer, the phonograph, improved the telephone and the typewriter.

In Paris, a military parade, played 22 orchestra, tri-colored flags hung in every window. They say that even the hearses carrying the dead then, was decorated with tricolors. And, of course, a riot of red, white and blue seized the Monet – three colors that flood the street is noisy, bright wave of hope. Three colors and nothing more, only an overwhelming artist's delight. When you look at the picture the first time, even there is no doubt that before the eyes – hundreds of French flags. But it turns out that if you look closely, it's not even the flags is a separate key strokes of colors that only due to the peculiarities of peripheral vision of the beholder are formed in the desired image. Only a single, almost fleeting moment you can see the Rue Montorgueil. This illusion is clear the world, which is only in the eye of the beholder for one moment connect the fragments and alive, delights not only art historians but also scientists studying the features of perception of color human. "Monet is just an eye. But what an eye." - repeat those and others after Cezanne.

By the way, on the same day from another window, and another street wrote Edouard Manet, who saw the same flags, but felt occurring quite differently. On his street with festive flags is a one-legged man on crutches, most likely returned several years ago with the war, which the French now so hard to forget and leave in the past. For the painter Edouard Manet, every single moment has a past and a future. Manet – a philosopher and a sage, a Mans is not only the eyes.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova
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