Meet Monet the thoroughbred hack

Overfamiliarity has bred a now almost fashionable contempt for Monet. But if, on one level, Monet: The Seine and the Sea might seem a decidedly easy-on-the-eye option, on another level it might appear a strange choice.

Focusing on a period of Monet’s career that spans less than five years — autumn 1878 to spring 1883 — this show concentrates on the canvases that Monet completed between leaving Argenteuil, the home patch of high Impressionism, and moving to Giverny where he established his magnificent waterlily garden.

During this interim period, he was living in Vétheuil, a remote rural village on a bend of the Seine some 35 miles (60km) northwest of Paris, and then in Poissy, from where he decamped to paint the Normandy coast. And though this can safely claim to be the first ever exhibition dedicated purely to works of this time, perhaps this is hardly surprising for, though it represents a most prolific time for the painter — he completed at least 300 pictures (some 80 of which are now on loan from galleries all over the world) — it is commonly considered about the most disappointing phase of his career.

It was a hard time for Monet. By the mid-1870s France was paying the financial toll of a lost war. The storerooms of his dealer were stacked, but the stock wasn’t shifting. And when Ernest Hoschedé, Monet’s most important patron, went bankrupt, he was forced in a glare of publicity to sell up for rock-bottom prices. Monet, impecunious, his paintings derided, had to move with his wife Camille and two children to a modest house in Vétheuil where he set up home with the extensive and now equally impoverished Hoschedé family.

He was nearing 40. He had got no further than he had been ten years earlier. And on top of that his wife was ill. She was not to recover. In the summer of 1879 she died. Her deathbed portrait, included in this show, gives intimate expression to his loss. Sunlight bathes one side of the bed, but the sole answering glow comes from a bunch of white blossoms upon his deceased wife’s breast. The contrast between death’s coldness and the warmth of a new living day could not be more poignant.

But most of the works from the period on which this show focuses are far from personal. They were intended to appeal to a bourgeois urban public. The scenes Monet paints — rural riverbanks, meadows and picturesque villages — are similar to those chosen by more conventional Salon painters. They are often of the sort that would have been recommended by tourist guides of the period.

As, hastily, he turns out pictures of the same subject again and again, it might be tempting to see these pieces almost as the contemporary equivalents of modern-day picture postcards. And perhaps in one sense they were. They were meant to be commercial. Monet needed to make money to pay off his debts. His still-lifes of this period, a few of which are included in this show, make the point. Not only could he work on them when the weather was inclement and plein air painting impossible, but also, at that time, they were fashionable and so easy to sell.

But this show works on more than one level. Of course there are some lovely pictures to enjoy. His paintings done during his first harsh winter in Vétheuil, for instance, have a cool, bleak beauty. The Seine froze over and then, with the thaw, washed great blocks of ice downstream that Monet painted as they drifted upon the water’s mirroring expanses.

But there is also a scholarly dimension to this show. These paintings raise fundamental questions about the nature of Modernism. In the 1860s and early 1870s artists had sought to challenge academic traditions by engaging with novel aspects of the contemporary world. Monet’s 1873 Railway Bridge at Argenteuil is an example. The train, a symbol of modernity, steams across the painting, cutting a sharp contrast to the sail boats beneath. And yet, the paintings in this show find Monet wilfully turning away from such obvious symbols. Painting at Fécamp he deliberately does not depict the busy modern port but concentrates instead on the effects of light and the weather. By the late 1870s Monet was pursuing the idea of Modernism through paint, irrespective of subject. He was stripping his outlook of all prejudices and preconceptions, concentrating instead on exploring to the full the pictorial potential of every scene. The acuity of his vision is increasingly astonishing.

Perhaps Monet thrived on adversity. Perhaps he worked his way out of his problems. Whatever, as this show continues, the viewer can trace his progress on an almost month-by-month level. Monet, it seems, had a competitive nature. He is seen pitting himself against landscape painters of the past, against Corot and Courbet, Millet and Renoir. This show emphasises this by hanging a few of their paintings among his in order to demonstrate how he borrowed compositions from Daubigny, for example, or how in his powerful depictions of the dramatic rocks at Etretat he compared himself to the great master of the sublime, Delacroix.

But, more than that, Monet was pushing himself. This show brings together, often for the first time, series after series of paintings of similar subjects, but each time treated differently. Monet is constantly trying out different viewpoints, different brushstrokes, different colour harmonies and tones as he moves towards the almost abstract style of his later works. Figures are all but abandoned — which is a relief since any that stray into his pictures tend to seem little more than coloured dolls and the few portraits that he has painted, though interesting in the case of his studies of his sons, seem barely more competent than those that the street artists who have set up for the festival might paint.

Some paintings may not work. For all the energy of the brushstrokes, they remain mere marks upon a flat surface. But Monet’s concentration is inimitable. He perseveres, repressing all distractions, until nature, it seems, is compelled to expose its true spirit. Paint undergoes an almost alchemical transformation. Pigment becomes mood. How does this happen? Study this show and you might get a unique chance to glimpse the magic in progress. But blink and you’ll miss it. This is your only chance to see Monet: The Seine and the Sea. The show is not travelling anywhere else.