How Did Monet Create His Famous Paintings?

Look up Claude Monet on the Internet, and you'll be bombarded with products ~ Monet calendars, mouse pads, prints, jackets and spectacles cases. It's ironic that Monet's preoccupation with nature has inspired so much manufactured merchandise.

Like other members of the Impressionist group, the French artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) worked in an unconventional way. Until the Impressionists, it was standard practice for painters to create sketches from nature but to do most of the work in the studio. Monet, on the other hand, took the Impressionistic reverence for nature to the extreme. His typical day consisted of painting outside from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. He wanted his work to be informed solely by the landscape, rather than his preconceived ideas about how it looked.

The artist often spoke of his radical abandonment of the traditional rules of painting; even he was astonished at the colours he was using. His most famous series of paintings are Rouen Cathedral, Haystacks and Water Lilies. In these works, he aimed to capture the changing light. This required him to work on several canvases at a time that corresponded to different times of the day and weather conditions. While it might seem from the spontaneous brushwork that Monet worked quickly, the process took weeks, months, even years. He joked that he would have to pay the landlord to remove all the green leaves from an oak tree so that he could finish a commission which he had begun the previous winter.

Perhaps Monet's most celebrated work, the Water Lilies series was completed in the last three years of his life. During this time, his eyesight was affected by cataracts, although it was partially restored through surgery. The artist worked tirelessly on the water lilies theme, writing to a friend, 'These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age and yet I want to succeed in expression what I feel.'

Whatever brought the artist closer to nature was embraced. He constructed a special outside studio for working on his large-scale Water Lilies paintings. He built a boat that would accommodate his easel for painting water scenes. Once, as he stood painting beneath a cliff, he was nearly swept to sea by a giant wave. The water threw his palette, covered his beard in paint and smashed his painting to pieces!

Nature was Monet's greatest muse, and he pursued it relentlessly; yet, he acknowledged that what he strove for was ultimately unattainable. As he put it, 'I am following Nature without being able to grasp her'. Whether or not Monet could grasp nature, many people feel that he got closer than any other artist.