Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (62 page)

3
    Quoted in Ronald R. Bernier,
Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin de Siècle France
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2007), p. 73.

4
    Hoschedé, vol. 2, p. 112. For Monet on the
enveloppe
, see
Gil Blas
, March 3, 1889.

5
    
Gil Blas
, March 3, 1889.

6
    
American Magazine of Art
, March 1927.

7
    Martet,
Clemenceau
, p. 216.

8
    
Gil Blas
, September 28, 1886.

9
    
Le Temps
, June 7, 1904.

10
   Charteris,
John Sargent
, p. 126.

11
   
Modern Art
, Winter 1897.

12
   For an excellent study of how Monet’s works were not merely spontaneously improvised compositions created before the motif, see Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” pp. 90–108.

13
   
Gil Blas
, June 22, 1889.

14
   Christopher Lyon, “Unveiling Monet,”
MoMA
, No. 7 (Spring, 1991), p. 22.

15
   Quoted in Geffroy,
Claude Monet
, p. 121

16
   
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
, June 1909.

17
   Marcel Proust, “Journées de lecture,” in
Contre Sainte-Beuve
, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 178, quoted in Levine, p. 314, n. 34.

18
   Philip Hook, quoted in the
Times
, December 31, 2014.

19
   Geffroy,
Claude Monet
, p. 335; Hoschedé, vol. 1, p. 96.

20
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 179.

21
   
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 96.

22
   Théodore Licquet,
Rouen: précis de son histoire, son commerce, son industrie, ses manufactures, ses monumens
(Rouen: Édouard Frère, 1831), p. 17.

23
   WL 1343.

24
   
The American Magazine of Art
, March 1927.

25
   WL 40.

26
   Hoschedé, vol. 1, p. 73.

27
   
The American Magazine of Art
, March 1927.

28
   Mirbeau,
Correspondance avec Claude Monet
, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1990), p. 210.

29
   WL 1064.

30
   
Modern Art
, Winter 1897.

31
   The story is told in Léon Daudet, “Un Prince de la Lumière,”
L’Action française
, December 8, 1926.

32
   
Claude Monet
, p. 335.

33
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 101.

34
   Martet,
Clemenceau
, p. 238.

35
   WL 1066.

36
   
Le Temps
, June 7, 1904.

37
   WL 1831 and 1832.

38
   WL 1850.

39
   Quoted in Philippe Piguet,
Claude Monet au temps de Giverny
(Paris: Centre culturel du Marais, 1983), p. 270.

40
   
Chicago Tribune
, May 16, 1908. Tucker suggests that the much-publicized accounts of Monet’s destruction of his canvases “might even have been a sly public relations campaign to encourage already enthusiastic American collectors to acquire more of his pictures, since they seemed to be becoming rarer” (
Claude Monet: Art and Life
, p. 190).

41
   
Correspondence avec Claude Monet
, p. 215.

42
   WL 1854.

43
   
Le Gaulois
, May 5, 1909;
Comoedia
, May 8, 1909.

44
   Christopher E. Forth, “Neurasthenia and Manhood in fin-de-siècle France,” in
Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War
, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 2001), pp. 329–62.

45
   
La Revue de l’art ancien et moderne
, June 1927.

46
   Antonin Proust,
Édouard Manet: Souvenirs
(Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1913), p. 84.

47
   WL 1060.

48
   
Cahiers Octave Mirbeau
, ed. Pierre Michel, no. 8 (2001), p. 261.

49
   For the following information I am indebted to Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” pp. 90–108.

50
   André Masson, “Monet the Founder,” trans. Terence Maloon, in Shackleford et al.,
Monet and the Impressionists
, p. 190.

51
   Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” p. 98.

52
   Lyon, “Unveiling Monet,” p. 22.

53
   
Revue Hebdomadaire
, August 21, 1909, quoted in Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 246.

54
   For good discussions of Monet’s revolutionary technique at this point, see Tucker,
Claude Monet: Life and Art
, pp. 190–8; and Spate,
Claude Monet: The Colour of Time
, pp. 254–62. Tucker points out that Monet reversed “one of the most fundamental tenets of landscape painting—that sky is up and land is down” (p. 191), while Spate writes that he “destroyed the notion of the “view” (p. 254).

55
   
Revue Hebdomadaire
, August 21, 1909, quoted in Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 247.

56
   Hoschedé, vol. 1, p. 135.

57
   Quoted in Geffroy,
Claude Monet
, p. 240.

58
   
Comoedia
, May 8, 1909, quoted in Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 214.

59
   Quoted in Roger Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism and the Arabesque of Observation,”
Art Bulletin
(June 1993), p. 299. For the fin de siècle interest in decorative painting, see Tucker,
Monet in the ’90s
, pp. 133–4.

60
   
Revue des Deux Mondes
, June 1906.

61
   
Le Gaulois
, May 22, 1909.

62
   
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
, June 1909.

63
   
L’Art moderne
, July 7, 1889.

64
   Quoted in Anne Y. Smith, “The Whittemores of Connecticut: Pioneer Collectors of French Impressionism,”
Antiques & Fine Art
(Spring 2010), p. 158.

CHAPTER FOUR: A GREAT PROJECT

1
    
Claude Monet
, p. 331.

2
    
L’Art et les Artistes
, December 1905, trans. Terence Maloon in Shackleford et al.,
Monet and the Impressionists
, p. 198.

3
    Michel Georges-Michel,
Peintres et sculpteurs que j’ai connu, 1900–1942
(New York: Brentano’s, 1942), p. 35.

4
    
Gil Blas
, June 5, 1914. Monet claimed in 1920 to have fourteen Cézannes in his bedroom (
La Revue de l’art ancien et moderne
, January—May 1927), but other reports place at least some of them in his studio.

5
    
If I Remember Right
, p. 223. On alcohol at breakfast, see W. Scott Haine,
The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789—1914
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 94.

6
    Louis Gillet,
Trois variations sur Claude Monet
(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1927), p. 45.

7
    WL 2123.

8
    WL 2119.

9
    WL 2113.

10
   Quoted in Ray Rushton, “Ingres: Drawings from the Musée Ingres at Montauban and Other Collections,”
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts
(February 1980), p. 159.

11
   On the Le Havre caricatures, see Tucker,
Claude Monet: Life and Art
, p. 9; and Hugh Edwards, “The Caricatures of Claude Monet,”
Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago (1907–1951)
, vol. 37 (September–October, 1943), pp. 71–2. For his sketching portraits in the Brasserie des Martyrs, see Firmin Maillard,
Les Derniers Bohèmes: Henri Murger et son temps
(Paris: Librairie Satorius, 1874), p. 42.

12
   Marmottan inventory no. 5128 (Sketchbook 1); and Marmottan inventory no. 5129 (Sketchbook 6).

13
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, pp. 78–9.

14
   
La Revue de l’art ancien et moderne
, June 1927. For his improved eyesight in 1914, see WL 2123.

15
   
La Renaissance: Politique, Littéraire et Artistique
, June 13, 1914.

16
   WL 642.

17
   Quoted in Spate,
Claude Monet: The Colour of Time
, p. 280.

18
   WL 2103.

19
   Geffroy,
Claude Monet
, p. 332. For Blanche’s support and encouragement at this time, see also Burke, “Monet’s ‘Angel,” pp. 74–5.

20
   
Manette Salomon
(Paris: Charpentier, 1902), pp. 162 and 267–8.

21
   
L’Artiste
, June 1, 1873.

22
   Pissarro, quoted in Christoph Becker et al.,
Camille Pissarro, Impressionist Artist
(Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1999), p. 103. For Pissarro’s view on the ideal distance from the canvas, see John Gage, “The Technique of Seurat: A Reappraisal,”
Art Bulletin
, vol. 69 (September 1987), pp. 451–2.

23
   Gimpel,
Diary of an Art Dealer
, p. 75.