Three Fishing Boats

Title

Three Fishing Boats

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

"Three Fishing Boats"

Artist: Oscar-Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

Title: Three Fishing Boats

Genre: Marine art

Date: 1886

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Height: 730 mm (28.74 in); Width: 925 mm (36.41 in)

Collection: Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest), Hungary

Claude Monet was perhaps the most respected member of the group of Impressionists. At various phases of his life he often spent time on the Normandy coast, which was one of his favourite subjects. One such fondly frequented place was Étretat, a small fishing village and weekend resort close to Le Havre. He regularly painted on the shore, and with a lust for adventure set about discovering an almost unapproachable stretch of coast to the west. Even in the harshest of circumstances he would be outside, capturing the landscape, the movement of ships, or perhaps the herring fishing boats pulled up onto the pebbly beach. We see these latter slightly from above, and this bold view narrows the space, rendering the composition tenser. For Monet the key issue was to suggest the frothy waves of the sea and the currents of air, for which he uses broad, bouyant brushtrokes.

Monet's coastal paintings mostly depict deserted, unpeopled places, and there is nothing to show that at the time Étretat was a popular resort. He was interested not in anecdotal episodes, but in effects of form and colour. The writer Guy de Maupassant, who at the time was also staying in Étretat and often met Monet, described his friend's working method, as he took five or six canvases with him which he swapped around according to the changing light. When Monet returned home to Giverny in December, he took with him more than fifty half-finished works, which he later finished in his studio.

Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter, 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, 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. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. He began painting the water lilies in 1899, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature and later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.

This is a Google Art Project image, thank you Google!

Text Credit: Google Arts & Culture

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

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September 29th, 2020

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