Painting With Monet

Monet's revolutionary approach to painting allowed a new understanding of light, composition, and form. By exploring how his paintings were conceived, constructed, and executed, aspiring artists can broaden their technical knowledge and vastly expand their creative horizons. The first in a new series of instructional books, Paint Like Monet takes the reader on a guided journey through the artist's methods, tools, materials, and techniques. Step-by-step exercises and detailed explanations of composition and context are complemented by ideas on developing a personal style and tips on how to check and improve a painting in progress. This hands-on encounter with Impressionist theory is rich with insight and inspiration for anyone interested in art-offering a master class with one of history's greatest artists.

"The Landscape Painter's Workbook takes a modern approach to the time-honored techniques and essential elements of landscape painting, from accomplished artist, veteran art instructor, and established author Mitchell Albala"--

From a world authority on impressionism and nineteenth-century French art comes this new addition to the World of Art series on the art and life of Claude Monet. One of the most famous and admired painters of all time, Claude Monet (1840– 1926) was the architect of impressionism—a revolution that gave birth to modern art. His technique of painting outside at the seashore or in city streets was as radically new as his subject matter: the landscapes and middle-class pastimes of a newly industrialized Paris. Working with unprecedented immediacy and authenticity, Monet claimed that his work was both natural and true, and therefore, entirely novel. In Monet, James H. Rubin, one of the world’s foremost specialists in nineteenth-century French art, traces Monet’s development, from his early work as a caricaturist to the late paintings of water lilies and his garden at Giverny. Rubin explores the cultural currents that helped shape Monet’s work, including the utopian thought that gave rise to his politics, his interest in Japanese prints and gardening, and his relationship with earlier French landscape painters and contemporaries such as E´douard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Featuring more than 150 color illustrations of his key works, Rubin establishes Monet as the inspiration for generations of avant-garde artists and a true patriarch of modern art.

Acclaimed historian Ross King paints the most nuanced, riveting and humane portrait yet of Claude Monet, arguably the most famous artist of the 20th century. We have all seen—live, in photographs, on postcards—some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. They are in museums all over the world, and are among the most admired paintings of our time. Yet nobody knows the extraordinarily dramatic story behind their creation. Telling that story is the brilliant historian, Ross King—and in the process, he presents a compelling and original portrait of perhaps the most beloved artist in history. As World War I exploded within hearing distance of his house at Giverny, Monet was facing his own personal crucible. In 1911, his adored wife, Alice, had died, plunging him into deep mourning at age 71. A year later he began going blind. Then, his eldest son, Jean, fell ill and died of syphilis, and his other son was sent to the front to fight for France. Within months, a violent storm destroyed much of the garden that had been his inspiration for some 20 years. At the same time, his reputation was under attack, as a new generation of artists, led by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, were dazzling the art world and expressing disgust with Impressionism. Against all this, fighting his own self-doubt, depression and age, Monet found the wherewithal to construct a massive new studio, 70 feet long and 50 feet high, to accommodate the gigantic canvases that would, he hoped, revive him. Using letters, memoirs and other sources not employed by other biographers, and focusing on this remarkable period in the artist's life, Ross King reveals a more complex, more human, more intimate Claude Monet than has ever been portrayed, and firmly places his water lily project among the greatest achievements in the history of art.

Another fascinating book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism. If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon. Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for ‘Art.’ Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world. Full of fantastic tidbits of information and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.

For Monet, the act of creation was always a painful struggle. His obsession with capturing the effects of lighting in nature was much more intense than that of his contemporaries. In his words: “Skills come and go … art is always the same: a transposition of nature that requires as much determination as sensibility. I strive and struggle against the sun … I might as well paint it with gold and precious stones.” A beautiful display of Impressionist work, Great Masters Monet explores the extraordinary paintings of one of the Masters of the 19th century. Monet’s rapid brushstroke style in landscapes and scenes from everyday life illustrates his overall fascination with light and colour.

A major biography of the artist, supported by a wealth of examples of his work.

In this beautifully illustrated book, John House discusses the career and painting techniques of one of the greatest Impressionist painters, providing the fullest account ever written of Monet’s working practices and the ways in which they evolved. In so doing House throws much new light on issues central to the understanding of French Impressionist painting as a whole.