Monet cultivated the idea that he only ever worked directly from life onto canvas, spending "most of his life staunchly denying the role drawing played in his creative process"1. But in fact he "carried pocket-sized sketchbooks with him throughout his life"2 and his son Michel inherited eight sketchbooks with some 400 drawings and sketches.
The Unknown Monet exhibition includes digital versions of Monet's sketchbooks held at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris that allow you to 'page through' them or search through them by date or keyword. (Hopefully the exhibition organizers will also make this available on a DVD at some stage.) The Marmottan is home to the world's largest collection of works by Claude Monet. It's a combination of works donated by Victorine Donop de Monchy (the daughter of Georges de Bellio, a friend of Monet and his doctor) and by Michel Monet.
To Monet a sketch's "value and purpose was as an early preparatory stage in the process of making a painting"3, and he never exhibited nor sold any.
If you didn't have the words "water lilies" and "Monet" to associate with the sketch above, would you be able to interpret it or would it just be a jumble of squiggles? Yet when you relate it to one of Monet's water lily oil paintings, you can.
The writer A.S. Byatt expresses it most elegantly: "[Monet's] lily drawings are sketchy, abstracted swirls, which seem to relate to the design of the forms and movements of the canvases, either recording a rhythm of lily-pad ovals against a meandering line representing water, or light on water, or very roughly planning out the vertical and horizontal structures of these works without formal edges. ... They are the faint record, in linear form, of the brain and the eye ordering what is, in plant and water, and will be, in paint on canvas, a shining complex web of light and matter."4
References:
1. The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings Exhibition Brochure, by Lindsay Rothwell, Royal Academy of Arts, 2007, p.1.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Enchantments of Air and Water by A.S. Byatt, The Guardian, 3 March 2007.
The Unknown Monet exhibition includes digital versions of Monet's sketchbooks held at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris that allow you to 'page through' them or search through them by date or keyword. (Hopefully the exhibition organizers will also make this available on a DVD at some stage.) The Marmottan is home to the world's largest collection of works by Claude Monet. It's a combination of works donated by Victorine Donop de Monchy (the daughter of Georges de Bellio, a friend of Monet and his doctor) and by Michel Monet.
To Monet a sketch's "value and purpose was as an early preparatory stage in the process of making a painting"3, and he never exhibited nor sold any.
If you didn't have the words "water lilies" and "Monet" to associate with the sketch above, would you be able to interpret it or would it just be a jumble of squiggles? Yet when you relate it to one of Monet's water lily oil paintings, you can.
The writer A.S. Byatt expresses it most elegantly: "[Monet's] lily drawings are sketchy, abstracted swirls, which seem to relate to the design of the forms and movements of the canvases, either recording a rhythm of lily-pad ovals against a meandering line representing water, or light on water, or very roughly planning out the vertical and horizontal structures of these works without formal edges. ... They are the faint record, in linear form, of the brain and the eye ordering what is, in plant and water, and will be, in paint on canvas, a shining complex web of light and matter."4
References:
1. The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings Exhibition Brochure, by Lindsay Rothwell, Royal Academy of Arts, 2007, p.1.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Enchantments of Air and Water by A.S. Byatt, The Guardian, 3 March 2007.