CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Monte Caggio (1,090 m- 3,576 ft)
Italy
In Valle Bouna near Bordighera, 1884, Dallas Museum of Art
The painting
This landscape depicts the rugged countryside along the Riviera at the French-Italian border. The Valle Buona ("Tranquil Valley") is at the left. High on the right is a bare suggestion of Sasso, the mountain village dominated by the thousand-meter peak, Monte Caggio. Monet depicted this scene during his first painting trip to the Mediterranean. In 1884, he spent January through March at Bordighera, an Italian health resort, and the month of April at nearby Menton
The mountain
Monte Caggio (1,090 m- 3,576 ft) is a mountain of the southern Maritime Alps near San Remo, Italy. The nature reserve is the recreation area of the region. Monte Caggio will be approached on both approaches. One can enjoy a splendid view over the coast of the Italian Riviera from San Remo to French town of Menton. The access routes lead through Italian mountain villages typical of the region. The flora changes, depending on the altitude, from the typical palm trees along the coast over pines in somewhat higher locations to almost mid-European laubbaum growth at higher altitudes. Here are also some signposted mountain bike downhill trails. This tour is ideal for those who do not want to make the great tour of Dolceacqua and Pigna, but still want to trudge properly uphill.
The painter
Oscar-Claude Monet better known as Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting « Impression, soleil levant » (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons exactly like the japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) did with his 36 views of Mount Fuji.
Monet has been described as "the driving force behind Impressionism". Crucial to the art of the Impressionist painters was the understanding of the effects of light on the local colour of objects, and the effects of the juxtaposition of colours with each other. Monet's long career as a painter was spent in the pursuit of this aim.
Having rejected the academic teachings of Gleyre's studio, he freed himself from theory, saying "I like to paint as a bird sings."
In 1877 a series of paintings at Gare St-Lazare had Monet looking at smoke and steam and the way that they affected colour and visibility, being sometimes opaque and sometimes translucent. He was to further use this study in the painting of the effects of mist and rain on the landscape. The study of the effects of atmosphere were to evolve into a number of series of paintings in which Monet repeatedly painted the same subject in different lights, at different hours of the day, and through the changes of weather and season. This process began in the 1880s and continued until the end of his life in 1926.
His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891. In 1892 he produced what is probably his best-known series, Twenty-six views of Rouen Cathedral. In these paintings Monet broke with painterly traditions by cropping the subject so that only a portion of the facade is seen on the canvas. The paintings do not focus on the grand Medieval building, but on the play of light and shade across its surface, transforming the solid masonry.
Other series include Peupliers, Matins sur la Seine, and the Nenuphars that were painted on his property at Giverny. Between 1883 and 1908, Monet traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, including a series of paintings in Antibes (above) and Venice. In London he painted four series: the Houses of Parliament, London ; Charing Cross Bridge, ; Waterloo Bridge, and Views of Westminster Bridge. Helen Gardner writes: "Monet, with a scientific precision, has given us an unparalleled and unexcelled record of the passing of time as seen in the movement of light over identical forms."