Preview, Monet: The Seine and the Sea, RSA

Why 1878-1883?

The period 1878-1883 was a difficult one for Claude Monet. During the previous six years the artist had, with his wife Camille, enjoyed the joint pleasures of rural living in Argenteuil along with stimulating café society in nearby Paris. After moving in 1878 to Vétheuil, 37-year old Monet suffered enormous debts, watched Camille die, and lived through one of France’s coldest ever winters. In 1883 he moved to Giverny with his second wife-to-be, Alice, where they were to live successfully for the rest of their lives, cultivating the artist’s famous lily ponds.

Monet’s output during the period was prolific, numbering some 350 paintings (an average 3 per fortnight), one quarter of which are to go on display at the RSA next month. This will be the first exhibition ever to focus exclusively on the years 1878-1883, and should offer an unprecedented insight into the development of Monet’s most famous artistic achievements. Many of these – the series of haystacks, poplars and Rouen Cathedral – were to come later in his career, but the seeds were sown at Vétheuil.

Monet’s landscapes of the time can be loosely divided into two categories: his placid village views along the River Seine, and his wilder paintings of theatrical rock formations along the Normandy coastline. The massive rocky buttress at the Beach at Etretat had attracted many artists before him, including Delacroix, Corot, and especially Courbet, and Monet produced some of his most dramatic seascapes during this period. The village of Vétheuil offered gardens, poppy fields, picturesque buildings and, of course, the river. Water had always fascinated Monet, and its ever-changing surface patterns appealed perfectly to his Impressionist instinct for capturing fleeting moments of light and colour.

The increasing stresses of Monet’s private life are seen in his letters, but his art remained full of the spontaneity and dancing light for which he is famous. Monet left the urban subjects of railways stations and floating restaurants behind him, and embraced nature in a new and subtly different way. He depended less on recessional devices such as human figures, giving his compositions a far more abstract quality, flat and decorative, unanchored in scale or perspective. 12 beautifully cold canvasses of ice flowing down the Seine, painted outdoors in the freezing cold, prefigure his later canvasses filled with floating water lilies.

It was during this time that Monet started moving towards working in series. He painted the villages of Lavacourt and Vétheuil in different seasons, but from varying viewpoints, sometimes on either side of the Seine. In 1882, near the village of Pourville, he completed 14 canvasses of the customs officer’s coastal cottage, working on up to 8 different versions in one day depending on the changing atmospheric conditions.

It was not all land and seascapes during this period, though. Monet continued to paint still lives (a more lucrative genre) and portraits, the most moving of which is that of his wife Camille on her deathbed, shrouded and shimmering. Her veil could almost be made of water, flowing across her body and carrying her downstream in a wreath of evening light.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 20.07.03