Ep. 119: Monet – Top 6 Paintings

January 6, 2024 Peter Jans

Intro

Hello and Welcome to this episode of the podcast, "The Mnemonic Tree", where we add a single mnemonic leaf to our Tree of Knowledge.

I’m Jans you Mnemonic Man and today's episode will be on the French artist Oscar-Claude Monet. Yes, Oscar, and I can say until I started this episode, I have never known that Claude Monet’s first name was Oscar!

Monet showed an early interest in art and enjoyed drawing caricatures in his youth. He then went on to play a key role in the impressionist movement in the late 19th century. Another thing he popularised was painting outdoors to capture the varying effects of light and the nuance of colour.

Monet is also well known for his series of paintings where he would explore one subject and produce numerous paintings, notably Water Lilies, Haystacks, and the Rouen Cathedral.

Along with being a genius painter, he was also a master landscaper and gardener and to this day his gardens are still open to the public for viewing.

Today’s mnemonic is on Claude Monet’s top six paintings.

So, with no further ado, we will begin with a summary from Wikipedia.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_1899_Nadar_crop.jpg

Wikipedia Summary

Oscar-Claude Monet (UK: /ˈmɒneɪ/, US: /moʊˈneɪ, məˈ-/, French: [klod mɔnɛ]; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it.[1] During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting.[2] The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 (the "exhibition of rejects") initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.

Monet was raised in Le Havre, Normandy, and became interested in the outdoors and drawing from an early age. Although his mother, Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, supported his ambitions to be a painter, his father, Claude-Adolphe, disapproved and wanted him to pursue a career in business. He was very close to his mother, but she died in January 1857 when he was sixteen years old, and he was sent to live with his childless, widowed but wealthy aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. He went on to study at the Académie Suisse, and under the academic history painter Charles Gleyre, where he was a classmate of Auguste Renoir. His early works include landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, but attracted little attention. A key early influence was Eugène Boudin who introduced him to the concept of plein air painting. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, also in northern France, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project, including a water-lily pond.

Monet's ambition to document the French countryside led to a method of painting the same scene many times so as to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. Among the best-known examples are his series of haystacks (1890–1891), paintings of Rouen Cathedral (1892–1894), and the paintings of water lilies in his garden in Giverny that occupied him continuously for the last 20 years of his life.

Frequently exhibited and successful during his lifetime, Monet's fame and popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century when he became one of the world's most famous painters and a source of inspiration for a burgeoning group of artists.

Extracted from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barberini_August_2023-Claude_Monet_-_Steilk%C3%BCste_von_Aval,_1885_-_Sammlung_Hasso_Plattner.jpg

Mnemonic

Monet – Top 6 Paintings Mnemonic – Monet’s BIG Water Frogs

(Picture Monet’s pond in his backyard full of lily pads and big water frogs sitting on these lily pads)

1. The Magpie (1869)

2. Bordighera (1884)

3. Impression, Sunrise (1872)

4. Gare Saint-Lazare (1877)

5. The Woman in the Green Dress (1866)

6. The Frog Pond (1869)

Five Fun Facts

1. Now as you would have garnered from the Wikipedia article Monet was the founder of impressionism. But this moniker of impressionism did not come out of love for his paintings, rather it was a mockery of the unfinished look of Monet’s paintings by critic Louis Leroy, who intimated Monet’s paintings were an impression.

2. Monet was lucky to be alive for a number of reasons. Firstly, he escaped Paris with his family before the Franco-Prussian war broke out which resulted in the death of many, as Paris was besieged. Secondly, he jumped into the Seine in an attempt to take his own life. He did regret this and got out and was declared no longer insane!

3. Monet was an avid gardener and the successful sale of his art enabled him to be able to buy his rented house, surrounding buildings, and some land. The gardens formed a big part of his later years and were the focus of many of his works.

4. Though Monet’s Garden was a thing of beauty some people were not happy with it at all. His neighbours who were cattle farmers were extremely concerned that the number of imported plants from all over the world, would poison the waterway and harm their animals.

5. Similar to Beethoven slowly losing his most important sense for his music hearing, Monet was losing his most important sense, sight. He had two cataracts which were clouding his vision and making it appear yellow. He was extremely apprehensive about surgery but eventually came around and had both removed in 1923.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_Waterlilies_-_Nympheas_(1908).jpg

Three Question Quiz

Q.1. Who was a key influence on Monet and introduced him to outdoor painting?

Q.2. Monet is thought to have destroyed up to 500 of his own paintings. Is that True or False?

Q.3. What subject has Monet painted the most?

Bonus Q. What decade did Monet Die?

Mnemonic Recap

Monet – Top 6 Paintings Mnemonic – Monet’s BIG Water Frogs

(Picture Monet’s pond in his backyard full of lily pads and big water frogs sitting on these lily pads)

1. The Magpie (1869)

2. Bordighera (1884)

3. Impression, Sunrise (1872)