I imagine the trees in the painting below as statues, obelisks or monuments. Perhaps I simply became accustomed to seeing such wide flower fields in an urban environment. In a way, for a city guy like me, these poppies are idyllic and inaccessible; I can picture them only on a town square, surrounded by concrete — but not in their natural environment. I suppose this is a degradation of sorts, or, from a different perspective, an integration of nature into the urban in the mind of city people. Seeing flowers in nature is a rare occasion for urban population and I am sure at least some of you can sympathize. But what I would like to discuss is how these poppy fields, despite the stifled association, and maybe because of it, gain in aesthetic value.
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It was probably since Monet’s celebrated “Impression: Sunrise” that water reflections became a trademark device of the artist. Moreover, it is thanks to him that these mirroring effects may be considered an important element of impressionism as a whole. It seems that the mutability of water, or simply put, the ripples, are inherently impressionistic — and they were such long before the term was ever coined. Taking into account these two main qualities, which basically translate to movement and rhythm (the ripples) and color (the reflections), water indeed makes the most obvious choice of subject matter for an impressionistic painting.
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These poplars are difficult to approach: they produce a somewhat alienating grid not unlike prison bars, particularly in the version where the trees are explicitly dark. In a way, everything around them may be considered as a beautifying counteraction, except that the trademark water reflections only serve to extend the prison effect.
I think that this was a bold and honest choice of subject matter on Monet’s part, to portray nature in its less pretty moments, and it is truly admirable that he managed to extract and capture the little beauty that there was to find in the poplars you see below. Because let’s face it, they are quite ugly.
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Personally, I prefer the Haystacks to the Roeun Cathedral series. However, they are opposedly different if viewed in the urban vs. agricultural context — so perhaps the comparison is irrelevant. Still, it seems that Monet’s color effects agree better with wide and open landscapes than with elaborate Gothic architecture. In the Cathedrals there’s a sense of hyper tension, ensuing from overabundance of detail coupled with the usual palette swamping. In a way, there is a thematic imbalance between the painter’s style and subject matter in the Rouen Cathedral series. Back to the haystacks, I think that in these series the artist may have found the perfect combination of subject and style; they feed off each other in curious ways, and I will try to build an argument expounding this interaction.
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Claude Monet produced thirty paintings of the Rouen Cathedral.
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In most of them, the Gothic church is shown from the same angle; it is the colors that were the main subject of variation. By using unpredictable, sometimes improbable palette combinations — or “harmonies” — as the artist called them, Monet strove to capture the structure in different light and weather effects, some of which, I have to say, seem just as the colors, improbable and unpredictable. I certainly do not wish to contend Monet’s artistic logic, because impressionism has its own rules, and it was the man himself who invented them. Still, for someone uninitiated, there is considerable surprise involved, and my goal here will be to try and outline its origins from a fresh perspective.
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