Claude Oscar Monet - Oil Painting Reproductions

Each Claude Oscar Monet oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.

1840-1926 • French • Painter • Impressionist

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you -a tree, a house, a field, or whatever." - Monet

"Merely think , here is a little square of blue, here an able log of pink, here a streak of yellow, a paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, till it gives your alive impression of the scene before you ." - Monet

On December 27, 1873, a group of artists, calling itself the Society A non yme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc, met to plan an exhibition of their works to be held on April 15,1874, two weeks before the opening of the official SALON . They were dissatisfied because even the ""alternative"" SALON DES REFUSES used juries to select from among rejected works, and they wished to turn their backs on all forms of discrimination. Their exhibition was hung alphabeti cally and in only two rows, giving everyone equal opportunity to be seen. It was at this exhibition that one of Monet's five paintings, called Impression I SM, gave its name to the movement that had begun over a decade earlier. The painting was ridiculed and IMPRESSION I SM was at first a term of dérision. Yet it revealed Monet's in tent, as quoted above, and reported by one of his students, an American artist, Lilla Cabot Perry (AMERICAN IMPRESSION I SM). The goal of these painters, as finally understood, was ""not to render a landscape but the sensation produced by a land scape."" Monet and others explored the individualized nature of sensation, part by painting the same subject at the same time as another artist did (see RENOIR). Monet also studied the temporal nature of sensation by painting the same subject from the same point of view at different times of day, in different seasons or weather conditions. In the latter category is 1890s series Rauen Cathedral -some 40 views-his numerous haystacks, and about 16 views of Waterloo Bridge in London. In 1899 he began painting Water Lilies, from those in the water garden he con structed at his home in Giverny. He even built a special studio so he could paint them on outsize can vases. In Monet's paintings, each short, thick brushstroke of unmodulated color was correlated to a visual sensation, and the effect was to dissolve form as conventionally seen and to reconstitute it, or at least express it, in terms of light (in which color is implicit). Summing up to Gustave Geffroy, his friend and biographer, in 1909 Monet wrote: ""I have painted for half a century and will soon have passed my sixty-ninth year, but far from decreasing, my sensitivity has sharpened with age. As long as constant commerce with the outside world can maintain the ardor of my curiosity, and my hand remains the prompt and faith ful servant of my perception, I have nothing to fear from old age."