9781422271780

CLAUDE MONET

on the coast with Boudin, he met Johan Barthold Jongkind, a Dutch landscape and seascape plein-air painter who worked mainly in France, anticipating Monet’s later practice of painting the same subjects in different atmospheric conditions. Thus, at the beginning of his professional life, Monet had already been introduced to the two features that became the central foundation of his art, and thus of Impressionism. Monet returned to Paris in 1862 and, though he had been advised by Troyon to study with Couture, joined the atelier of Charles Gleyre. It is interesting to speculate what the effect on Monet—and on Impressionism— would have been had he chosen Couture. Gleyre was a

PLATE 8 Still Life: The Joint of Beef (1864) Oil on canvas, 9 x 13 inches (24 x 33 cm)

Monet undertook a number of small studies of grouped objects, particularly (as here) of meats and vegetables. As artificially arranged objects, as nature morte rather than living nature, they allowed him to concentrate on the intrinsic character of the objects he was exploring. The resulting work has some of the qualities of surprise and originality that already suggest that Monet was not content to follow a traditional painting career. It has also been noted that these paintings owe much to Chardin, whose still life paintings are among the most admired legacies of eighteenth-century French art.

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