Claude Monet--The Artist's House at Argenteuil, 1873

We are entering the back yard of the large house that Claude Monet was renting in the suburban town of Argenteuil, a fifteen-minute train ride down the river from Paris.??

He had already painted the nearby railroad bridge and the tracks leading right past the front of his house.?But in setting up his easel behind the house, he was deliberately excluding the modern, the industrial, the smoke and steam.??

In this picture, we get charm. A comforting secluded garden, a solid home, abundance, mid-summer calm--and class.?

At 32, Claude Monet was for the first time in his life making good, steady money. Three years earlier, during his self-imposed exile from France to avoid getting drafted during the Franco Prussian war, he had discovered a gallerist, Paul Durand-Ruel, who would buy almost everything he created, at good prices. In a country where a laborer might, if lucky, make 2,000 francs in a year, Monet made 12,100 francs in 1872, and 24,800 in 1873, the year he painted this picture.

?Right away, we are invited into a generous expanse of sand (actually stones crushed to a powder, then compacted into a hard surface).?Such a large backyard was a luxury that only the rich could afford in Paris, but here in the down-river town of Argenteuil, with their newfound wealth, the Monets could rent a three-story house with a basement, hiring two maids to help out, and, oh, a gardener to manage the elaborate plantings we see here.?

This is the private sphere. We are separated from the public street by the three-story house, presented here as a high wall ascended by ivy, and hidden from the neighbors by the overflowing foliage of the trees and flowers.?

We are immersed in a bourgeois retreat. The house blocks out the noise and steam from locomotives coming and going every half hour, right across the street, bringing visitors from Paris, and letting Monet get to the Gare St Lazare in Paris in a mere fifteen minutes.?The house also separates him from the local businesses that are recovering from the war --mining gypsum, harvesting asparagus, making iron.?And this home isolates his family from the struggles of a country paying off its debts to Prussia, rebuilding from war, and suffocating in the grip of monarchists, priests, and militarists.

In 1873, the Catholic Right, for example, has just persuaded the government to seize the land at the top of Montmartre, where the Communards had fought and died, and build Sacré-Coeur on top of their blood, as a sign of “repentance.” Maréchal MacMahon has been appointed President, vowing a return to “moral order,” giving power to the “notables,” that is, the rich, aristocratic, and corrupt of the old regime. The Duke of Chambord is jockeying to come to power as a king, ending the republic. And the Salon jury is even more conservative than it was under the Emperor Napoleon, reducing the opportunities for Monet and his friends to reach potential customers.

All that distressing news is left out. Monet chooses to set up his easel in this enclosed world, bounded by the creamy wall of the house on the right, and the dense garden on the left and in the rear.?

He picks a small linen canvas (roughly two feet by two and a half feet) meant for portraits, then turns it to landscape orientation.?This size will, he knows, appeal to his customers--a bourgeois family, say, living in a cramped Paris apartment, not a palace or chateau.??

He lays in a pale grey ground, then paints the sky blue with quick thin strokes, leaving patches bare in his haste.?

He immediately addresses a technical challenge--shade.

Here, the house blocks out the direct sunlight, casting half the backyard into mid-afternoon shade. But even in that subtle grey light, we can enjoy the bright blue of the porcelain pots, the red and purple of the flowers next to the house, the many greens of the climbing ivy, and the rich blue dress on the woman looking out at us.?

This painting proves that color can survive life in the shade.?

In the other half of the painting, direct sun hits the ground in fat cream-colored stripes at the far side of the yard, brightens the far flower beds, and highlights the foliage on the flowering trees.?

On the left, he outlines the masses of leaves, then plunges in, building up complex combinations of intense color.??

Sometimes he mixes two colors on the palette, and applies them in a single brushstroke.?Other times he messes up wet paint with more wet paint.?

Putting one bright color next to its complement, contrasting a dark shadow with the light flower, he makes the garden dense, and alive.

Having set up this well organized, understandable scene, Monet decides to add an actor, downstage.?He chooses his son Jean, still wearing the smock he will soon have to give up. (On his sixth birthday, coming in August, Jean will have to start wearing pants). Jean holds a hoop. But not for long.?No child can hold a pose for long, and we can see evidence that Monet reconceives the picture of his son several times.

The Art Institute of Chicago has done extensive technical analysis, indicating that the boy starts out facing us. But then his father turns him around.??

The giant bow on the back of his smock starts out one color, then turns black. In this turnaround, Jean loses his individuality, becoming a figure, not a person.

And over at the door, the woman watching: Is that Camille, the boy’s mother? Or a maid??

She starts out as a face in greyish beige, with dark hair and brown touches indicating her deep eyes, characteristics of Camille that we find in many portraits.?She is shown wearing a cream colored “robe d’intérieure” with large sleeves, but as Monet paints, her robe gets tightened up, and painted over in pink and blue, and her face is washed in pink, becoming more opaque. She loses her nose and mouth.

Churlish scholars have suggested that Monet was coldly detached, treating his wife and son in this way.?But there comes a point in developing a painting when Monet stops looking at the scene, and retouches to make the colors work together, to sharpen a few contrasts and contours (such as the row of pots outlining the sandy area), to integrate the whole.?In this case, I suspect, he was “using” his son as a figure on the ground, and turning his wife into just some person of interest.?Not a portrait, then. A modest landscape.

Perhaps Monet was also pondering the question of privacy.?In many of his paintings of his wife and child, he blurs and obfuscates their faces, as if to shield his family from public view.?

Reaching the Public

Monet already had a large public presence, and this house at the corner of the rue Pierre Guienne and the boulevard Saint-Denis was large enough for him to invite many writers, collectors, and artists to come and visit.?Some, like édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, painted next to him, in this very backyard, or out along the river. Their conversations often focused on the difficulty of getting their work seen by the public, particularly now that right wingers and academics on the Salon jury were closing them out of the state’s gigantic exhibition, which drew thousands of potential customers every day.?

?Jean-André Rixens, Un Jour de vernissage au palais des Champs-élysées

In the living room of this house, during the summer in which he painted this picture, Monet brought together a group of fellow artists to develop a plan for a cooperative enterprise--something unheard of--an exhibition organized by artists themselves to show multiple works by each artist--the event we now know as the first Impressionist show.?

Perhaps after these young rebels signed their agreement to form the Société anonyme coopérative d’artistes, they all came out into this back yard to celebrate with some wine, and the revolutionary song that the government had just banned, the Marseillaise. Can you hear it now?