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Monet: The Magpie Holiday Cards

Monet: The Magpie Holiday Cards

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Price: $17.95
Member Price: $16.15

Item# 80-000949 



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Description

Claude Monet’s (French, 1840–1926) magpie perches on a fence rail to survey the sunlight and shadows of a snow-blanketed country landscape. Among Monet's earlier works, this painting was noted as "pale" when first viewed due to its subdued hues creating light and shadow in a sunlit winter world. (Without greeting)

Produced in cooperation with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

20 cards and 20 envelopes per box. 4 7/8'' x 6 1/4''.

  • 20 cards and 20 envelopes per box
  • 4 7/8'' x 6 1/4''
  • Without greeting

Art History

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

Raised in Normandy, Monet joined the Paris studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre when he was twenty-two. His classmates included Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and other future Impressionists. Monet enjoyed limited success in these early years, with a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons of the 1860s.

In the late 1860s, Monet started to extend his need to capture transitory and fleeting states of nature. Taking Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley with him, Monet tackled the great challenge of a snow- covered landscape, which Courbet had grandly explored with great success not long before. Toning down Courbet's lyricism, Monet preferred a frail magpie perched on a gate. Sun and shade construct the painting and the Impressionist landscape was born, five years before the first official exhibition when the movement was given its name. This painting of a place in the countryside near Etretat, executed on the spot, uses very unusual pale, luminous colors. The novelty and daring of Monet's approach, which was more about perception than description, explain the painting's rejection by the jury of the 1869 salon.

The rejections of his ambitious works inspired Monet to join with Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and others in establishing an independent exhibition in 1874. His painting Impression: Sunrise (1873), one of Monet's contributions to this exhibition, drew particular scorn for the unfinished appearance of its loose handling and indistinct forms. Yet the artists saw the criticism as a badge of honor, and subsequently called themselves "Impressionists" after the painting's title, even though the name was first used derisively.

Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. His first wife, Camille, and his second wife, Alice, frequently served as models. His landscapes chart journeys around the north of France and to London, where he escaped the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Returning to France, Monet moved first to Argenteuil, just fifteen minutes from Paris by train, then west to Vétheuil, Poissy, and finally to the more rural Giverny in 1883. His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir, who often painted alongside their host. Yet Monet's paintings cast a surprisingly objective eye on these scenes, which include few signs of domestic relations.

Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio. His quest to capture nature more accurately also prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, color, and perspective. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, Monet's asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two- dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light-colored primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.

Monet's interest in recording perceptual processes reached its apogee in his series paintings that dominate his output in the 1890s. In each series, Monet painted the same site again and again, recording how its appearance changed with the time of day. In the 1910s and '20s, Monet focused almost exclusively on the picturesque water-lily pond that he created on his property at Giverny. His final series depicts the pond in a set of mural-sized canvases where abstract renderings of plant and water emerge from broad strokes of color and intricately built-up textures. Shortly after Monet died (a wealthy and well-respected man at the age of eighty-six), the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.




Description

Claude Monet’s (French, 1840–1926) magpie perches on a fence rail to survey the sunlight and shadows of a snow-blanketed country landscape. Among Monet's earlier works, this painting was noted as "pale" when first viewed due to its subdued hues creating light and shadow in a sunlit winter world. (Without greeting)

Produced in cooperation with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

20 cards and 20 envelopes per box. 4 7/8'' x 6 1/4''.





  • 20 cards and 20 envelopes per box
  • 4 7/8'' x 6 1/4''
  • Without greeting




Art History

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

Raised in Normandy, Monet joined the Paris studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre when he was twenty-two. His classmates included Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and other future Impressionists. Monet enjoyed limited success in these early years, with a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons of the 1860s.

In the late 1860s, Monet started to extend his need to capture transitory and fleeting states of nature. Taking Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley with him, Monet tackled the great challenge of a snow- covered landscape, which Courbet had grandly explored with great success not long before. Toning down Courbet's lyricism, Monet preferred a frail magpie perched on a gate. Sun and shade construct the painting and the Impressionist landscape was born, five years before the first official exhibition when the movement was given its name. This painting of a place in the countryside near Etretat, executed on the spot, uses very unusual pale, luminous colors. The novelty and daring of Monet's approach, which was more about perception than description, explain the painting's rejection by the jury of the 1869 salon.

The rejections of his ambitious works inspired Monet to join with Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and others in establishing an independent exhibition in 1874. His painting Impression: Sunrise (1873), one of Monet's contributions to this exhibition, drew particular scorn for the unfinished appearance of its loose handling and indistinct forms. Yet the artists saw the criticism as a badge of honor, and subsequently called themselves "Impressionists" after the painting's title, even though the name was first used derisively.

Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. His first wife, Camille, and his second wife, Alice, frequently served as models. His landscapes chart journeys around the north of France and to London, where he escaped the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Returning to France, Monet moved first to Argenteuil, just fifteen minutes from Paris by train, then west to Vétheuil, Poissy, and finally to the more rural Giverny in 1883. His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir, who often painted alongside their host. Yet Monet's paintings cast a surprisingly objective eye on these scenes, which include few signs of domestic relations.

Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio. His quest to capture nature more accurately also prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, color, and perspective. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, Monet's asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two- dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light-colored primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.

Monet's interest in recording perceptual processes reached its apogee in his series paintings that dominate his output in the 1890s. In each series, Monet painted the same site again and again, recording how its appearance changed with the time of day. In the 1910s and '20s, Monet focused almost exclusively on the picturesque water-lily pond that he created on his property at Giverny. His final series depicts the pond in a set of mural-sized canvases where abstract renderings of plant and water emerge from broad strokes of color and intricately built-up textures. Shortly after Monet died (a wealthy and well-respected man at the age of eighty-six), the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.



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