Monet and Mrs. Monet in a boat

Edouard Manet • Painting, 1874, 82.5×100.5 cm
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About the artwork
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Genre scene
Style of art: Impressionism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1874
Size: 82.5×100.5 cm
Artwork in selections: 24 selections

Description of the artwork «Monet and Mrs. Monet in a boat»

Mrs. Monet Camilla Donsieu will be only a few days before her death - the priest who comes to perform the rite of assembly to the dying woman immediately marries Claude Monet. By this time they will already have two sons and 13 difficult, often hungry and cold, years together. So at the time of writing the picture she was still Camilla Donsi. But friends, of course, considered Camille and Claude a real family.

In 1874, Claude Monet and Edouard Manet live nearby - to meet, it is enough for them to cross the Seine. Manet spends the summer in Gennevilliers, and Monet now lives in Argenteuil, on the other side. The first Impressionist exhibition took place in the spring, in which Edouard Manet did not participate (as well as in all subsequent ones), but which significantly affected his already fragile and fragile reputation. Young artists who challenged academic art are called the Manet gang. And after their daring antics with Man’s own exhibition, after a fleeting success in the Salon, they were again recorded in the rebel camp. It was he who started the rebellion, he is the culprit, the inspiration of the whole gang of mediocre artists who don’t put the skill of the painter in vain and consider the sketches painted in a couple of hours as paintings.

Edouard Manet will never become an impressionist and will not be able to share with their young followers their obsession. Seasonal effects, light spots, fleeting highlights, random views, colored shadows and dense air - all this is not enough for him. But he would not mind this summer of 1874 to properly understand the impressionist style of writing and ways of working. He puts his easel next to Claude Monet's easel - and tries to write water in his manner. Yes, it turns out, yes, entertaining, yes, these luminous colors of Monet are really fascinating. The experiment was a success. Twice this summer he writes Monet himself - in the garden watering the flowers, and in the floating workshop, which the artist built from an ordinary boat. He built a wooden hut above the boat, in which he could sit with an easel, floated away in the middle of the river and looked into the water.

Edouard Manet writes a friend the way Monet himself would write: with oblong short bright strokes - water ripples, with a few conventional strokes - Camille's face, which is almost invisible from afar, a deliberate dark shadow on the summer trousers of a working artist, the further to the horizon - the more less clarity and definition. The contour of the boat trembles and fades in the sultry humid air, the outline of the canopy is outlined almost casually. Manet became interested in impressionism, Manet plays in impressionism. It is given out by the unearthly, elusive color of the boat cabin - even and uniform, not found in nature and daring in its deliberate decorativeness. The railing in his painting was just as flashy. "Balcony" - unnatural green color - and for this railing Mane seriously inherited from critics. And further. The black. These are impressionists, Claude Monet was one of the first to declare that black is not a color, that it does not exist in nature, but even artificially created by man, it takes on any shade in the sunlight. But Mane boldly takes black to write Claude Monet's shoes and tie, to put a few black strokes on distant boats and even hooligan to rub on the grass. Edouard Manet - an artist who considers the main idol and teacher Diego Velazquezand therefore I am sure that black is the color.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova
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