Patrick Bade
Impressionism, Part 2

Patrick Bade - Impressionism, Part 2

- [Patrick] Looking back on the early years of Impressionism, Claude Monet said, in those years we painted as the bird sings. But as the Impressionists entered middle age, their forties in 1880s, they became self-conscious about their art. And the their art loses that spontaneity and freshness of vision, which was one of the most attractive qualities of impressionism in the 1870s. All of them went through some kind of crisis and moved off in different directions in the course of the 1880s. The crisis and change can be seen very starkly in this picture by Renoir, which is currently hanging in the National Gallery in London. It’s actually shared by the national galleries in London and Dublin. And I often think about this picture. If there were some kind of great catastrophe and it was hidden away in the basement of the National Gallery and rediscovered in a couple of hundred years time, nobody knew who painted it. Some clever art historian would say, oh, it’s obvious. This picture, we can see two hands in this picture. It looks like it’s by two different artists. And he began, Renoir began this picture in around about 1880, just before this crisis of confidence overwhelmed him. And he finished it around about 1885. And even on this small image on the screen, I think you can see that the difference between the figures on the right-hand side, which belong to his impressionist phase and the upper portion and the left part of the picture have quite a different technique. Maybe you can see it better here with these details. You’ve got that fluffy broken brush work of impressionism.

On the right-hand side, we have much firmer, more decisive contours on the left-hand side, a more volumetric quality, almost sculptural quality, the torso of the young woman. And you can probably also see that the brushwork is in a much, is applied in a much more regular and disciplined way. And in particular, the flesh tones very smoothly blended. This picture is the last great, the Boatman’s Luncheon. Of course, it’s one of Renoir’s most loved paintings in Washington and very famous and very much reproduced. And it’s the last great masterpiece of his impressionist phase. And actually we can already see some telltale signs of change. The certainly, again, the contours are rather firmer than they are in, for instance, the Moulin de la Galette that I showed you on Wednesday. And it’s also significant that he uses the device of the awning so that in fact, although we have outdoor light and it’s a very luminous painting, you don’t have the dappled broken light on the figures that you have in the Moulin de la Galette. It’s a very joyous picture. And all the people in it were people that Renoir knew well and was fond of. The girl on the right looking up is the same model who posed for Degas. Oh, what’s her name? Ellen Andrée Ellen Andrée, she, four years earlier, she posed for Degas’s L'Absinthe, which you see on the right-hand side, you could hardly imagine two more different pictures, the extremely gritty grim realist picture of a down and out prostitute. In fact Ellen Andrée, in the early stages of her career, she was an artist model and she was also a prostitute, although the two were of course interchangeable at the time, it was just expected that any art, any woman who would take her clothes off for money would be open to prostitution.

She later had a very distinguished career in the theatre, long lasting career. And the charming young girl on the left playing with a little fluffy dog, this is Aline Charigot, who was Renoir’s model and lover, she later married him and they had three children together. She also modelled for this picture on the right-hand side, the nude blonde nude, which actually Renoir painted in Italy. So as I said in 1880, he suddenly was overcome with a great crisis of confidence. And his letters are full of anguish saying, I’ve reached a dead end. I can’t draw. My art is completely worthless. And he took himself off to Italy because he wanted to look at the art of the Renaissance. He wanted to look at classical art. And I think we can see the result of that already in this picture on this very, very beautiful, very charming picture of the adorably plump Aline Charigot. Her plumpness, of course, is one of the things that he liked about her. And he also said he always enjoyed watching women eat. He liked women with a healthy appetite and he perhaps encouraged her rather too much as she later became very obese. And here is another character, interesting character that I’m sure you know about. The gentleman in the top hat in the background of the Boatman’s Luncheon is Charles Ephrussi. And I imagine most of you will have read The Hare with Amber Eyes. And he was certainly the most interesting and the most engaging and charming member of Ephrussi family for me. He was very much the hero of that book, The Hare with Amber Eyes. He was a highly cultivated man, great collector.

• [Technician] Sorry Patrick, you appear to be frozen. Everyone please bear with us while we try to sort out the technical problem.

• [Patrick] So as I said, I dunno where you got cut off, I was talking about Charles. Oh, I was talking about this picture of course, which is Madame Georges Charpentier, very fashionable hostess and in a very luxurious interior. Actually, interestingly with lots of Japanese objects, screens and prints and so on. Interestingly, Renoir was probably the only one of the impressionists who didn’t like oriental art and didn’t like Japanese things. So I think this is very much her taste rather than Renoir’s. So he, through Charles Ephrussi, he was introduced to the woman you see on the left. Her name was Louise de Morpurgo. She was actually Ephrussi’s lover but she was married to a wealthy Jewish banker called Louis Cahen d'Anvers. This is her portrait, not by Renoir, it’s by an artist who would’ve been much more fashionable and much more expensive at the time, Carolus-Duran. Who is the teacher of Sargent. So I don’t think she would’ve risked having her portrait done by such an unknown young artist as Renoir. But she was prepared to entrust him with the portraits of her three daughters. And on the right-hand side, you can see it’s Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d'Anvers. This dates from 1881, tragically Elisabeth, the older daughter on the right lived well into the 20th century and into the Second World War, and then was taken by the Nazis and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. So it’s difficult to look at these pictures without thinking of what was going to happen later. So as I said, Renoir achieved a considerable fashionable, success at the end of the 1870s. And he could have gone down that road to become a sort of very fashionable portraitist like Sargent.

This is a enormous exactly contemporary painting by Sargent of two children, the Pailleron children. Their father was a noted journalist. Comparing the two, I mean, they’re both sumptuous paintings, gorgeous paintings. I have to say. I think that Sargent is more, he’s a more penetrating portraitist from a psychological point of view. And there’s a real sense of tension, an interesting tension between the boy and the girl in the painting by Sargent. The Renoir’s is absolutely gorgeous and it’s a touching picture of two little girls. But I don’t feel that, I don’t think he had that kind of an interest in human psychology that that Sargent had. The other portrait that he painted for the Cahen d'Anvers was of their older daughter Irène. This is the most exquisite and the most touching portrait. And of course there is a terrible and tragic history associated with this portrait. When she grew up, she was married off to Moïse de Camondo. This was of course, normal amongst these great Jewish banking families. They’re all marrying into one another and marrying their cousins in the 19th century. But it, so it was a sort of arranged marriage and it was very, very unhappy and scandalously, she left Moïse de Camondo for another man. He kept the children, so she was really cut off from contact with her children. It was the daughter who of Moïse and Irène who’d inherited this portrait. And I’m sure you know, cause it’s a very familiar story that that whole family were taken off by the Nazis and murdered in the Second World War. So, and all their private possessions were pillaged. So the only person left actually to inherit this portrait was Irène. And it must have been a very sad thing for her to receive it. And ironically, she sold it and it was immediately resold to a Swiss arms merchant who was a terrible collaborationist.

Actually, he supplied the German war machine with armaments, got very rich doing so, and he was known as the Merchant of Death. And so it’s now, I think rather uncomfortably and sadly in the Bührle Collection in Zurich in Switzerland. Now, somebody asked me last week, spoke or mentioned that Renoir was anti-Semitic. He certainly was, there’s plenty of evidence for it in his letters. I mean, he may have had some justification for being very irritated with the Cahen d'Anvers. They didn’t like the portraits, they delayed paying for them and they underpaid him. But nevertheless, his resentment in his letters towards the Cahen d'Anvers family was expressed in very unpleasant racial terms. Here is a detail, you can see how exquisitely painted, this picture is wonderfully delicate, sensitive portrait of the young Irène Cahen d'Anvers who was to have such a tragic life. When Renoir went to Italy, he travelled right down to the boot of Italy and he crossed over to Sicily and he heard that in Palermo, Wagner was staying. So he, through contacts, he managed to reach Wagner and persuade Wagner to pose for him. To love the music of Wagner was a kind of badge of honour for the French avant garde, either literally or artistic around about 1880. In fact, Renoir later he was invited by Roid and he was bored out of his mind by having to sit through the ring cycle. But he got on with Wagner very well. If you would believe his son, Jean Renoir who wrote a very, very enlightening and charming book called Renoir My Father, which I recommend to you, but it’s not entirely reliable. And one of the things that Jean Renoir says, oh, well my father didn’t get on that well with Wagner because they disagreed about the Jews.

If you read Renoir’s own correspondence at the time, it’s very clear that they got on like a house on fire. And one of the things that they got on so well about was their mutual dislike of the Jews. But it’s a kind of an irony, really, that this portrait was painted two days after the completion of Wagner’s opera Parsifal. And you sort of think, well, it is rather extraordinary that they did get on because Boatman’s Luncheon, from Boatman’s Luncheon to Parsifal, there is a, you know, light worlds of difference between these two works of art. So he learned a lot from his trip to Italy and he came back and his style was utterly transformed. I don’t really think you could, only in the loosest sense, could you describe a picture like this as being impressionist. It has very little to do with what he’d been doing in the previous decade. This is one of the two most important paintings of this phase that he called his dry phase in the middle of the 1880s. The title of this is Afternoon at Wargemont. Wargemont was the country house of a diplomat called Paul Berard. So he’s painted Berard’s wife and his children. It’s got these rather strange chalky colours that almost look fresco light. And you can see that it’s quite thinly, quite smoothly painted with very regular brushwork. Not that free spontaneous brushwork of the previous decade and very sharply defined contours. Here’s a detail and you, where you can see, if you look particularly, I think if you look at this, there’s flowers on the left-hand side.

You can see the brushwork is applied in little regular parallel strokes of the brush. A technique very similar to that of Suzanne. And in fact, Suzanne and Renoir were very close friends in the middle of the 1880s, I think the influences is from Suzanne to Renoir. And here here’s a detail of a Suzanne still life on the left-hand side where you can see very similar kind of brushwork. This is the high point really of this phase in the middle of the 1880s. It’s a kind of near classical style really. And this is a big picture. It’s in Philadelphia, it’s called The Large Bathers. And when this was exhibited at the gallery, George Pati, it caused consternation amongst the other impressionists, particularly Pissarro. He really didn’t know what to make of this picture, which seemed to be so radically turning its back on everything that impressionism had stood for. If you remember, the key thing about impressionism is spontaneity, painting directly from life. And if you have outdoor subjects, of course, painting those pictures out of doors. This is very clearly not, this is a studio picture. This is not painted out of doors. And he and again the three figures, very artificial, really very artificial poses and very strongly contoured, very volumetric. They have an extremely sculptural quality to them. He relapses somewhat in towards the end of the 1880s. And that this very hard style gives way to a much more, much softer, less sharply defined style. And you can see certainly on the left-hand side, this young woman arranging her hair. There’s a lot of broken brush work that’s similar to the impressionist technique in the background. He hasn’t returned to impressionism.

This is not something fleetingly observed. This is something very artificial, very carefully arranged. Of course, no woman in the 19th century was going to be her doing her Toilette and arranging her hair stark naked on a tree stump in the garden. This is a complete fantasy. It’s completely unreal. And the painting on the right-hand side is, well, this is an interior scene of course, and it could be defined as what the French would call a Toilette, a woman bathing. And this is the 1880s, of course is the decade where Dugas was painting and drawing his Toilette. And Dugas had a completely new approach to the female nude, what he called the keyhole nudes. That the woman is supposedly unaware of being observed. You are looking at her through a keyhole and she’s completely unconscious of anybody looking at her. And she’s just going about her normal everyday evolutions. So a very interesting compare and contrast here between Dugas on the left-hand side and Renoir on the right-hand side. Now, although that girl, she’s apparently asleep, I don’t think she’s really, I don’t think you could really sleep in this pose and she’s got her eyes closed, but she knows that we are looking at her. She certainly does. This is not a keyhole nude in that sense. And of course the pose with the arms behind the head is a beauty pose. It’s one to show off the body, particularly the breasts. The breasts are, are raised and shown off to their best advantage through the pose.

Renoir eventually married Aline Charigot, you can see her here the results of her hearty appetite that she’s put on a lot of weight and become very matronly. They had three children, three sons. And I sometimes wonder how accidental the spacing of these children was. Renoir loved painting children. Next to painting the female nude it was the subject he most enjoyed. And so it was certainly at least very convenient for him that he had three sons whose births were very spaced out. So it was Pierre the oldest in the sailor costume. He was born in 1885. Jean, who’s the little boy here with his nursemaid, nursemaid Gabrielle, he was born in 1894. And Claude, the youngest, I’ll show you shortly, was born in 1901. That meant that over a period of a quarter of a century, Renoir had these children to hand to paint This is, I think a very enchanting picture. It’s in the Orangerie. I will be taking a group to see that next week over Christmas. And it shows Jean, the second of the two sons with his wet nurse and nursemaid Gabrielle. She was a favourite model for Renoir. This is a later picture for her. As Madam Renoir became very obese and suffered from health problems, she needed a lot of help in the household. And she used to import girls, sometimes distantly related from her native village. Again, Renoir loved to be surrounded by women. In a certain sense, he proclaimed his love for women in words and in his paintings. Quite different from Dugas, who was always very spiky and rather misogynistic in his comments. On the other hand, you might think that actually Dugas’s attitude to women in some ways was more respectful than Renoir’s. Renoir didn’t, he didn’t believe in education for women. He said, I don’t want to have sex with a lawyer.

And he didn’t think women should even be really taught to read. And he said that he liked women who were a bit dim and he said he, when he got a woman to pose for him, he liked to engage in very banal conversation so that they would have the kind of vacant look on their face, which was what appealed to him in a woman. But these women who were part of the household, they really had to multitask to use a modern word because they were expected to do the housework. They were expected to look after the children. They were expected to do the cooking. And at a moment’s notice, they were expected to whip off their clothes, to pose for the master in the nude as Gabrielle clearly did here. And this is the, the younger, youngest of the sons. This is Claude. And as I said, small children, the boys were dressed as girls and their hair was long. And Renoir, he delayed the cutting of the hair as long as he possibly could Because he liked his little boys with long hair. This is a drawing from the 1880s of Aline Charigot, and this is presumably, this must be the eldest son here, and she’s breastfeeding it of obvious memories, memories of Renaissance, religious paintings. And you can see that there’s this quality I’ve already mentioned very volumetric, very solid, very sculptural. And you see it even more in drawings of the 1880s, like the one on the right-hand side. So it was a kind of natural for Renoir to move from painting into sculpture. Here is a sculpture based on that painting on the left-hand side, but the famous sculptures of Renoir which you see in the museums of the world like this one are only conceptually by Renoir.

He didn’t actually physically have much to do with the making of these sculptures. The reason was that by the time that he became very interested in sculpture, wanted to make sculptures, he was very afflicted by terrible, terrible arthritis. I mean, his hands were completely distorted. I mean, towards the end he couldn’t even pick up a brush. The brush had to be put into his hands. So it was actually the sculptor Maillol who helped Renoir out. And he suggested a young Catalan pupil of his called Richard Guino, g u i n o, who actually made all the sculptures of Renoir that we have today. Now in, today modern, these sculptures are just labelled Renoir. But in France, the descendants of Guino, who is the technician who made the sculptures, sued the Renoir family for recognition of their father’s work. And the judgement went in their favour. So if you see any sculpture by Renoir in a French museum in the Petit Palais for example or the Pompidou Centre, the labelling always says, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Richard Guino I don’t know why Richard Guino didn’t really develop an independent career. I have this drawing, but you can actually see a self-portrait reflected in the glass. So I took the photograph. It’s a drawing I picked up quite cheaply in Paris by Richard Guino. I think it’s very beautiful, very, very seductive female nude. Quite different, isn’t it? From, I mean, he has his individuals style.

It’s not like a a Renoir nude, but in the end they had a big falling out. And the reason was that Renoir had a visit from Rodin who was of course the most famous sculptor in the world at the time. And he rather dishonestly gave Guino the day off and didn’t tell him that Rodin was visiting his studio. Obviously he didn’t want to admit to Rodin that it was Guino who made the sculptures not Renoir himself, like all the impressionists Renoir’s first dealer was the family of Durand-Ruel. They played a very, I should have mentioned them last time, of course, they played a very heroic role in supporting the Impressionists when they were rejected from the salon. And when they were having a very hard time selling their work, He moved onto to other dealers, particularly Ambroise Vollard. And here are two portraits he painted of Vollard. Unusual because, rather like Anglade, Renoir rarely painted men, but he obviously, I think he had a real affection for Vollard who had a, rather, he was a crayol, he had rather exotic appearance. And that suggested for Renoir to dress him up as a bull fighter in this portrait on the left, which is in the Petit Palais and the one on the right, which is in the Courtauld institute. And then he moved on to the firm of Bernheim-Jeune. And this is Monsieur and Madame Bernheim. So despite his frequently expressed anti-Semitism in his letters, he even has one to say about Pissarro, who was actually a lifelong friend. But he was certainly happy to have Jewish dealers to represent him. So this is a portrait of his dealer and his wife. And he was open to commissions though I’m not sure that either of these two pictures are commissions.

These are two paintings he made of Misia, Misia. she’s cropped up in, in my lectures before fascinating character kind of muse. She comes under different surnames. Her birth name was Godebska, her father was Polish, possibly Jewish, we’re not sure. She then married Natanson who certainly was Jewish, he who was the owner of the magazine, La Revue blanche. And she then moved on to a mysterious millionaire called Edwards. So she’s then Misia Edwards. And in fact, when these two portraits were painted this is the phase of her life when she was married to Edwards. And finally her last husband was the Catalan painter, Josep Maria Sert. But Renoir obviously fell completely in love with her. She was just his type pleasingly plump, had a lovely complexion that was always very, very important to him in a subject. He wants the woman with a pearly complexion that took the light as he put it. And he was completely fixated on her breasts. And he, she actually put sat for nine portraits by Renoir. And she just, she describes it in her memoirs and says how he, he was longing, longing, longing to see her, her breasts fully exposed. And he was always saying to her down a bit, down a bit, down a bit. Well, you can see she gets very close to the nipples on the right-hand side. But she would never give into his desperate entreaties to see her breasts fully exposed.

And she, he was reduced to sobbing frustration. And she later said, oh, she felt rather mean and that it, there would’ve been a, she should have been a bit kinder to a harmless old man. Right at the end of his life, his final muse and model was a girl called Catherine Hessling. She was spotted by Matisse and he immediately thought, oh, she’s the Renoir type, I’m going to send her to Renoir. And he was up, he was dead right. She was the Renoir’s type. You see her standing behind his wheelchair. You can see his gnarled hands in that photograph on the right. She was 18 when she posed in these pictures and she certainly doesn’t really look like an 18 year old in the painting on the left, you can see the vacant expression on her face that Renoir so liked, She then she. Renoir’s Son Jean fell in love with her and they married and he actually became a film director because he wanted to create vehicles, star vehicles for her in early silent movies. And you see this, this photograph taken around 1920, so it’s a couple of years after the painting on the left, that in fact her figure wasn’t quite as Renoir esque as you might think. And certainly she posed for these two figures, which is the final masterpiece of Renoir Now moving on to Camille Pissarro, as I said, he was actually nearly a decade older. He was a decade older than Renoir. He was born 1831, Renoir was born, 1841. He painted wonderful pictures, as I said last time in the 1860s, pre impressions, pictures, and also exquisite paintings in the 1870s in the impressionist manner, wonderfully fresh. And that sense of wonder at the beauty of the world, that is what that one of the appealing qualities of the impressionist.

But towards the end of the 1870s and into the 1880s, again, he, in his letters, he’s expressing dissatisfaction with his art. He like Renoir, he feels that the impressionism had sacrificed line and volume. And you can see in these two pictures of the 1880s that we’ve got much more defined lines again and much more strong sense of volume and the brushwork, I mean it’s not smooth like Renoir’s in the mid 1880s, but it’s much more regularised if a little fussy. He’s very, he was an anarchist and he liked painting working class people. He liked painting peasants. He was a great admirer of Millet who painted these monumental pictures of peasants in the 1850s and sixties. He was desperately disappointed when Millet died and his correspondence was published in the newspapers. And it turned out that Millet was no lefty at all. He was actually very conservative in his politics to the disgust of, of Pissarro. Pissarro top left, Millet bottom right. And so he’s, you can, he’s floundering around, I would say in the 1880s, not really sure which way to go and completely lacking in self-confidence. And in the mid to late eighties for a couple of years, he falls under the influence of the much younger Georges Seurat and he imitates this pointillist technique. This regular, very disciplined application of painting little tiny globs of colour over the whole canvas. This is an example, this dates from 1888 and this example of Pissarro under the influence of Seurat.

Here’s a detail to show you what the technique looks like, but I think he eventually came to realise that it didn’t work for him, it just didn’t. He’s, I think this, this really was a cul-de-sac, a dead end. But happily he does have a wonderful late phase where I feel he really finds himself again. He finds his way. From about 1890 onwards in a series of urban subjects, initially Rouen, he painted a whole series of pictures of Rouen, which was a great port, great industrial city, here’s another Rouen of Pissarro. And he painted also a number of pictures of Rouen Cathedral, not knowing that Monet was engaged at the same time in a whole series of Rouen Cathedral. So in 1894, there’s a Monet on the right-hand side, Pissarro on the left. So he was actually very discouraged and really rather depressed when Monet exhibits these absolutely sensational, extraordinary paintings of Rouen Cathedral. And he felt that they had really put his own paintings in the shade. And he was, I think probably right, they did. But there is this wonderful magisterial series of paintings right at the end of his life, round about 1900 up until his death in 1903. At this point, he was suffering from an eye ailment that made it very uncomfortable and difficult for him to paint out of doors. So he took hotel rooms, usually on an upper floor. This is the, he’s on an upper floor of the Hotel du Louvre just with place what’s now the Place Colette, on the right-hand side Comédie-Française, and looking up the Avenue de l'Opéra towards the opera house.

And he paints a whole series of these pictures in different weather and light conditions. You can see a very wintry day with snow. And the opera house has almost totally disappeared into the snowy fog at the end of the street. And he also did a wonderful series of the Boulevard Montmartre. He’s staying in the, oh, what’s the name of the hotel? I think it’s Hotel de Russie. And again, different, he stayed there several times. So it’s, you see the street in different light and weather and seasonal conditions. This is Boulevard Montmartre at night and a military parade coming up the Boulevard Montmartre. Now Monet, of course, I haven’t left myself with very much time to finish off with Monet. He also went through a huge crisis at the end of the 1870s that was as much a personal crisis as an artistic crisis. This is, his wife died in 1879, and he painted this, I think very moving picture, which the custom was in the 19th century. That there would be a vigil next to the corpse of the deceased. And so he was sitting beside her bed and looking at this woman that he’d shared his life with for 20 years and loved and she’d shared very difficult times with him. And he said he was almost horrified at himself. He felt compelled to pull out his paints and brushes and to record her almost as if she were a landscape with that kind of impressionist objectivity, objectivity. Now this is the whole point of impressionism, that it’s meant to be an objective transcription of what the eye sees.

You may question whether objectivity is even possible. And certainly from this time onwards, we get an increasingly subjective trend in Monet’s art. This is from the winter of 1879 to 80. It happened to be a very, very harsh winter. And the Seine froze over. This is the breaking up of the ice on the river Seine early in the year of 1880. And it has a sense of incredible desolation and you can’t help feeling that it’s permeated with his depression and sadness after the death of his wife. And he also paints in the early 1880s, a whole series of seascapes, the Norman coast, very turbulent. And these have, I would say, a romantic quality with the capital R, the sense of the power and the violence of nature. They’re, passionate pictures that actually I would say look forward to Van Gogh in the, this amazingly, bold, curvilinear passionate brushwork. If I showed you a detail like this, I could probably convince you that this was by Van Gogh, but there are moments of calm, of idyllic, calm. This is his back garden in Vetheuil. This is a very, a joyous, a really joyous picture. I’d be very happy to live with this picture, everything dissolved in shimmering sunlight. But as I said, like the other impressionist, he was dissatisfied. He realised that this, the concept of painting, capturing a moment is impossible.

Even if you have a cloudless day where the weather is very tranquil, the sun is constantly moving and the colours are changing really from minute to minute. So how to capture the moment. And the answer was to paint pictures in series. And the first of the great series of Monet’s late work are of haystacks at different times of the day. So what he’s doing here, he’s working simultaneously on a whole series of canvases. And he’d work at one at dawn and one later in the day, one at sunset. And he also did some at different times of the year. You can see this is a, a winter view of those haystacks. And then he moves on to these poplar trees, this a whole series. He actually, he, when he was about to paint these pictures, he heard that there was a, a plan to chop them down. So he actually bought he owned for a while, the land on which these poplars were growing. And what is interesting here is the almost abstract sense of composition that’s created by the cropping. So the tops of the trees are cropped and the refractions are cropped. And that you tend to read the whole thing as being a flat abstract design because of that. And these were, he was already doing quite well by this point. But the real breakthrough to great international fame was in 1894 with the series of Rouen Cathedral. In fact, these are painted over two years. And he had a studio above a bakery opposite the cathedral. And he had a rack constructed so that he could slide the canvases in, in and out of the rack. And he could work on several canvases over the day at different type points of the day from dawn till dusk. These are, I always think it’s a great pity that these were sold off and are all in museums around the world.

Whenever you can see an exhibition of late Monet and they bring them together, the effect is hugely enhanced by the more of them you see together and the well over 40 of them altogether. You can see 5 of them in the Musée d'Orsay. And that is a wonderful way to see them. Extraordinary when you think there’s these great, this mountain of stone and this enormous mediaeval cathedral that is completely dissolved in shimmering light and colour. Here are details of the portal from different pictures. I mentioned last time that he’d come to London to escape the Franco Prussian war. And he was in London over the winter of 1870, which was a particularly foggy winter. And he was impressed by the beauty of London through fog. I know a lot of Americans, who know London through Hollywood movies, imagine that London’s in a permanent fog. What’s not the case. I mean it is I suppose it’s partly because of its climate it can be quite misty. But these fogs of course were smogs. It was pollution. I do remember them from my very early childhood, but you don’t really get fogs like this anymore in London. But they fascinated Monet. And he came year after year around the turn of the century, stayed in the Savoy Hotel and he also had a studio at St. Thomas’s Hospital. So I think this is from the other side of the river. So this must have been from his studio in St. Thomas’ Hospital.

And you do certainly, if you see a sunrise or a sun that through a heavy fog, of course you do get these absolutely extraordinary colours. But you know, he’s taking a lot of liberties. He really is. If you, the big, the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster is not as high or slender as it looks in this picture. And this scruffy bridge, Hungerford Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, it’s always considered to have been a disgrace. I’m just reading actually a wonderful book about Zola and his time of exile in London. And in one of his diary entries, he says, how is it that a great city in London could have such a scruffy, ugly bridge? He said in Paris, you know, even if we had a railway on the bridge, the bridge would be made to look beautiful. Well, Monet saw beauty in this ugly scruffy bridge, I think partly cause it reminded him of Japanese woodcut images of bridges. The final quarter century of his life was based at Giverny, this rambling farmhouse that he acquired in a village in Normandy that actually when he bought it, it had a suburban railway line actually going through the garden. But I don’t think that particularly bothered him. And he created these gardens which have now become amongst the most famous and heavily visited gardens in the world. They are, he was a great horticulturalist, of course, he’s very, very fascinated by flowers and plants.

Became very, very knowledgeable and wanted to create gardens that would offer him wonderful visitors of colour throughout the year. And so here are the gardens, a map of the gardens and where you see the road that says Gasny one direction there or the other. That’s where the railway was. And now there was a tunnel. You can go under the tunnel and you can get to the Japanese water garden on the other side. I think he was rather as Van Gogh famously said, he went to south of France seeking his own private Japan. Monet created his version of Japan in his gardens at Giverny in the famous bridge of the water lily pond inspired by this Hiroshige print that you see on the left-hand side. Here is Monet on that bridge. And here he is in his studio painting these vast mural sized paintings of water lilies, of course paintings on this scale. There’s no way that they could be painted out of doors on the spot. You just couldn’t. So he’s had to abandon that aspect of impressionist philosophy. And I think he was very aware, I think towards the end of his life, that he was doing something different and that his pictures were not in any way objective. He’d become very, very popular with Americans. Somebody asked me about that last time, and I think as it was Mary Cassatt really who created the fashion for collecting impressionists in America. And the, the impressionists really, the Americans really fell in love with impressionism and American artists flocked to Europe and they flocked to Giverny and there was a whole colony of American artists in every, Monet actually became really quite irritated because every time he set up a canvas on an easel to paint a subject, there’d be hues of American, young American artists wanting to paint the same subject.

And one young man with considerable chutzpah came to Monet and showed him his, his painting in style of Monet. And Monet looked at it carefully and he said, Tim, why have you painted the colours like that? And the young man said, oh maître, that’s how I see them. And Monet said, no, it’s how I see them. And that was a very, very revealing remark because, it shows that he was actually aware of how personal and subjective his art had become. So this is another place I should be visiting next week with my group there in Paris over Christmas, the Orangerie where you have sort of quadraphonic Monet. There are two great oval rooms where you have, you are surrounded by these late paintings by Monet, but I think here he is as a very old man, troubled with, again, with eyesight, problems with cataracts, very worried that his perception of colour had been compromised. And these late paintings, which are now in the Musée Marmottan in the west of Paris, these are extraordinary. This is so beyond impressionism. This is expressionism both in the gestural application of paint and the exaggeration of colour. These are really amazing pictures that seem to be decades ahead of their time. So this is where I come to a stop and let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

I hope I covered everything that you missed.

That you think the breasts look well, that she obviously had very nice firm breasts.

Degas was, yes. We know that Degas was an anti-semite A very virulent one.

The, your thinking of, no I wouldn’t say that the Russians, were the first. You are thinking Morisot and who’s the other one? They didn’t start collect. The Americans were there before the Russians. The Russians didn’t start collecting until really the turn of the century.

Birth names of Renoir, his wife. You think? Well, Gabrielle, I didn’t know what her second name was. Gabrielle, who was the maid and his wife was called Aline Charigot. I do have a talk on, on Camille Claudel. I mean, we’ll have to see where it fits in. I there could be at some point I think it’d be interesting to do a series of talks about women artists. I dunno how that would fit in with my colleagues.

Yes, Picasso made a cubist portrait of Vollard. You could have a very nice small exhibition of portraits of Vollard. The Institute of Chicago has several haystacks.

Yes. They’re spread around the world. When did Monet not, I’m not sure what you mean by that question. He had cataracts right at the end of his life.

Ashuki thank you. Yes, of course is the other great collector, but they weren’t really collecting until the early 1900s.

This is Catherine, who’s just seen Monet and Mitchell at the Vuitton Foundation. I wasn’t actually planning to go, but my, Nicole Farhi, I talked to last week, she said it was really wonderful and I must go. So I will make the effort when I go back.

Yeah. Thank you very much indeed for your kind comments. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. And we will move on, on Wednesday to the post-impressionists.