Claude Monet

In 1877 Monet had painted a series of works that capture the smoke-filled Saint Lazare railway station in Paris at different times of day. In the 1890s Monet returned to this idea of a concentrated series of paintings based on a single motif. In his series of Haystacks, begun in 1890, the rather ordinary subject matter allowed Monet to emphasize subtle changes in light and weather conditions. Each painting has such an individual character that the series also seems to chart Monet's shifting feelings in front of nature. In 1891 French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed 15 of the Haystack paintings in his Paris gallery.

Monet followed the Haystacks with a Rouen Cathedral series (1892-1894). With their heavy encrustations of paint that capture flickering light and shadow, the works challenged accepted understandings of impressionism. The cathedral façade virtually dissolves, and an objective rendering no longer seems to be Monet’s goal. With this series, critics began to relate Monet’s work to the symbolist movement, in which artists used color to achieve a highly individual and subjective interpretation of a scene.

Gardens were a recurrent theme for Monet in the 1870s, and paintings of his own garden dominate his later work. In 1890 he purchased a house in Giverny that he had been renting for seven years. He began to develop its gardens, introducing an ornamental lily pond and a Japanese-style bridge. These and other features of his idyllic estate were the subject of a steady output of large decorative paintings. He generally began by painting outdoors, but would then return to his studio to work and rework his canvases, which had become even more layered and complex than before.

Despite frequent periods of financial anxiety, Monet never lacked buyers for his work, and by the 1890s his sales were strong, especially in the United States. The culminating honor of Monet's career was the installation in the Orangerie des Tuileries, a museum in central Paris, of monumental paintings of water lilies, on which he had worked for more than a decade preceding his death. In these works reality seems to dematerialize as he expresses the interplay of color, light, foliage, and reflection in a tangled mass of brushstrokes. With his eyesight beginning to fail in his final years, Monet explored his subject so closely and thoroughly that the whole dissolved into its parts and began to resemble abstract art.