Works by Claude Monet

Claude Monet painted one motif many times over to catch how light and weather changed it, sometimes on as many as eight canvases at once, moving between them as the hours passed.

As a teenager in Le Havre, Monet drew caricatures of people he knew and sold them. Caricature of a Man with a Big Cigar, drawn in chalks in 1855–56, sets a huge head in a hat, a cigar jutting from the mouth, on a thin body sitting cross-legged on a chair. Drawings are rare among the works below: nearly all are paintings, most of them landscapes or water scenes. Eugène Boudin took him out to paint in the open air, and in the 1870s at Argenteuil Monet kept a sailboat to paint from on the Seine. In The Bridge at Argenteuil of 1874 the river is made of short, flat strokes of blue and white with touches of yellow, cut by two bare masts.

From the 1880s he worked in series, going back to one subject at different hours and in changing weather. On a London visit in 1900 he began painting Parliament from St Thomas' Hospital, late in the afternoon and at sunset, and he went on retouching the London pictures until 1904. In The Houses of Parliament, Sunset the towers are a single blue silhouette against a pink and yellow sky, and the sun breaks up on the water into dashes of orange and pink. In Venice, in the autumn of 1908, he worked the same way, setting out by gondola before eight each morning.

The water garden at Giverny filled his last twenty years. He enlarged the pond in 1901 and 1910 and set up easels all around it. His first pond pictures, shown in 1900, were mostly of the Japanese bridge. By Water Lilies of 1906 the bridge and the banks have gone: the canvas is nearly square, the sky is there only as a pale reflection, and clumps of pads with pink and red flowers float across it. As his sight failed in the 1910s his strokes grew broader and his pictures darker; he put off cataract surgery until 1923. Water Lilies (Agapanthus), from about 1915–26, is a long, low canvas with no horizon, where pale pads drift through a haze of violet and green.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art.