Monet on Tour

Though Monet spent almost his entire life along a short stretch of the Seine, he did occasionally pack up his easels and set off to paint more distant landscapes. In this postcard, we’ll take a look at the artist’s trips to the dramatic Normandy coast, and then his first sojourn in northern Italy.

Monet grew up in Normandy and knew its dramatic coastline intimately. Between 1882 and 1897, he would make numerous trips to the Normandy village of Varengeville, and was especially enchanted by a small customs house that stood on a high cliff overlooking the village, which he painted four times, once in each season. The painting below shows the house during the height of summer.

There’s a great tension and grandeur to this painting. The cliff soars up, filling much of the canvas and making the viewer feel small and vulnerable in the face of the natural world. The little house seems to cling on at the bottom as the bottle-green and blue sea swirls below. 

In 1884, Monet visited Northern Italy, specifically the city of Bordighera, which lay just over the border on the Ligurian Sea. Monet was used to painting in northern climes, and the clear Mediterranean light was a revelation to him. He stayed in town for 79 days, painting an astonishing 50 works in that time. Writing in his diary, he said:

“Everything is wonderful, and every day the countryside becomes more beautiful; I am enchanted by this place."

The sparkling azure sea was particularly attractive to Monet, as were the palms, the lemon trees and the brightly coloured houses. In typical fashion, he was disappointed with his attempts at painting Bordighera, but in the picture below, I think he does a great job of capturing the candy colours of a Mediterranean sunset.

Monet was particularly interested in the town’s botanical gardens, which you can see in the picture above. It's a wonderfully exotic painting, with its splayed-out palms and its deep, thick banks of green. The vegetation seems overgrown, almost jungle-like, with the architecture just peeking out of the wild foliage. Like the Customs House, there’s a sense of the power of nature. Of how, in warmer climates, civilisation must fight a constant battle against a natural world that threatens to swallow it up.

Monet would make these trips after moving to Giverny, a small town on the Seine to the north of Paris. This location allowed him easier access to the Normandy coast, as well as the medieval city of Rouen where he would paint his famous cathedral series. Whilst here, he was relatively isolated from the community of Impressionists in Paris. Though Renoir, Cézanne, and Pissarro would occasionally travel to Giverny and paint with Monet, in his older age, he turned towards a more personal practice. We see a shift away from the spontaneous observation, of capturing the effects of light and weather in real time, that was the core tenet of the Impressionist movement, and towards a more systematic and deliberate practice of painting series (the same subject many times in different conditions), often finished in the studio. Now, I’ve finished my walk through the countryside, and I stand at the gates of the gorgeous gardens at Giverny. Join me in the next postcard as we wander through it and discover Monet’s late career.