Monet's Impressionist works are small, informal in composition, freely and spontaneously painted, showing everyday scenes treated in bright colour. He summarized his aim of painting in 1926: "I have always had a horror of theories, my only virtue is to have painted directly in front of nature, while trying to depict the impressions made on me by the most fleeting effects".
The Impressionists were principally interested in painting landscapes and scenes of modern outdoor life. Monet's "Dejeuner sur l'herbe" portrayed a scene of everyday bourgeois recreation. In Monet's "Dejeuner sur l'herbe", its bold emphatic brushwork echoes Manet, but the informality of its condition and its sparkling light effects are quite unlike Manet's grouping and studio lighting. Monet's "Dejeuner" showed the advantages of painting outdoor, it is consistent in lighting, portrayed with a single viewpoint, and the figures integrated with the landscape. Whereas Manet's picture had inconsistent lighting between fore and background, depicted with two viewpoints and the background, which is added afterward, acted like a backdrop with figures floating on it.
above: Monet, Women in the Garden, 1866--7
above: Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1863
The studies which he made at "La Grenouillere" (1869) had a summary treatment of reflections in water. They were boardly handled, with vigorous separate strokes of the brush and has a markedly asymmetrical, cut-off composition. The studies revolved round a wide unfocused area of reflections, treated as simple slabs of paint. These reflections of water represented the world as facets of colour, like abstract colour. Monet's "The Beach at Trouville" (1870) depicted nature in constant movement, with people hang on to umbrella, clouds and clothing blown by wind. By this approach, Monet worked on only the essential, capturing one aspects of nature at a time, as there was no time for detail before the light changes. He avoided detail, worked in a simplified, summary fashion. Monet's application of paint suited such paintings, as he applied paint quickly, with apparent, undisguised brushwork, which add movement to the image.
During the 1870s, Monet's colour became brighter, and he depended less on contrasts of dark and light tones to suggest light and shade. In open sunlit scenes, for example "The Red Boats, Argenteuil" (1875) and "The Road-Bridge at Argenteuil" (1874), he used luminous blues for the shadows in grass and trees, and expressed the fall of sunlight by treating the greenery in graduations of colour, from blue through various nuances of green to light yellow greens and yellows in the highlights. Also, in " Autumn at Argenteuil" (1873), where he reduced the whole surface to a network of nuances and contrasts of clear light colour - the blues of water, sky and the bank of sunlit trees, a rich orange with soft pastelly nuances.
above: Monet, Autumn at Argenteuil, 1873
The "Impression Sunrise" (1872), is a boldly and rapidly executed canvas, the subject of the painting is light, which is represented by colour. Monet paid less attention to the physical object, there is no arrangement of composition that placed the human figures as the focal point. The chiaroscuro system which highlight objects of importance was banished, as he aimed to suggest the even lighting of outdoor nature.
In "Snow Effect at Vetheuil" (1878), Monet broken the image into dabs of colour. The tree is painted in many colours with reflection, which makes the object became confused in colour. Nature in Monet's is represented as a series of surfaces, he deliberately avoided any meaning and paint only the colour and light. As Cezanne described: "Monet is just an eye, but what an eye!" Monet disengaged from his feeling, and observed colour purely. He based on Chevreul's Colour theory, which stated we mix colours in our eyes. Monet applied patches of colour and allowed the view to combine the colours to form meaningful things. The result colour is vibrant, intense, with movement.
Monet included in some of his paintings the modern, industrialized aspects of Paris, but this interest culminated in 1877 in a series of views of the Gare Saint-Lazare. In these paintings, the picture's texture became all busy and animated, every object is made up of sequences of mobile brush marks. The trains, bridges, figures, the puffs of smoke and steam, are all integrated into sequences of colours and tones that make no special focus on anyone element. These studies are similar in viewpoints, but are significantly different in colour, for example, the grays and the blues views. Here, Monet worked on the interesting light provided by the smoke and steam.
above: Monet,Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877
A single subject under different effects of light, atmosphere and weather dominated the large groups of paintings from 1891 onwards. These paintings depicted the fleeting moments, transitory effects of atmosphere. In the 'Haystack' series (1890-1), which lacked topographical interest, and tell us nothing abut the area in which Monet was painting was instead emphasized on atmosphere variations, on the way in which every successive light-effect modifies and transforms the appearance of the forms.
Both "Rouen Cathedral at Dawn" and "Rouen Cathedral at Sunset" (1892-4) showed similar viewpoints between them, the fundamental change between the paintings is the sunlight. With the change in the direction of the sunlight, from sunrises to sets, the entire atmosphere seems to change. Monet directed attention away from the details of the architecture to the nuances of the atmosphere that cloaked it. Monet consistently used clear light blues in the shadows in this series, in contrast to the sunlit surfaces, but added rich schemes of reflected colour in the areas of deep shadow such as the portals, to add variety and to mediate between the most extreme colour contrasts.
