The artistic oeuvre of the Impressionist painter par excellence, Claude Monet, seen through his seascapes. A fascinating virtual tour through the relationship between the impressionist master and the sea. Claude Monet: “The Manneporte” (1884) – detail Although not as famous as the well-know series listed above, the analysis of the “Cabane des douaniers” is fascinating. For example, in an example exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art the composition is virtually identical to that of the already commented “Cliffs near Dieppe”, while in an example belonging to an American private collection the dramatic effect of the composition is not only created by the verticality, but it is also reinforced by the asymmetry caused by the diagonal of the cliff. Claude Monet: “Cabane des douaniers at Varengeville” (1882) – Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Claude Monet: “Cabane des douaniers, Varengeville” (1882) – Philadelphia, Art Museum ·· Claude Monet: “Cabane des douaniers, effet du matin” (1882) – Private collection Two years later, Monet rented for three months a small castle in Antibes, in the French Riviera. The artist immediately fell in love with the landscape –“so full of light” – of the Mediterranean, and with the turquoise and pink tones of the Mediterranean light. Where to start the walk? —The path up Golden Cap begins at the car park by the sea in Seatown (location: DT6 6JU).

If you have any questions about painting seascapes or anything art related please leave them in the comments section below and I will do my best to answer them 🙂 Where to start the walk? —Begin the walk at the perfectly named Lookout Café just above Bowleaze Cove. This gave me an excellent composition with the cluster of whitewashed buildings at the focal point allowed me the opportunity to explore the contours of the land, using sweeping brush strokes to describe the slope of the hills in the foreground. Observe how I have painted the distant trees in a misty, soft tone, gradually strengthening the colour and tone towards the foreground. Use every opportunity to explore the contrast of hard and soft edges.ÔªøNow for the sea, now you may be wondering how you would paint a large body of water and not get bogged down in the complexities of the waves and light hitting the water. Well, I keep it simple!

The cliffs of West Bay came as an unexpected surprise to us. The faces of the cliffs look like ripples on a lake and, being sandstone rather than limestone, their golden colour gleams in the early morning or late afternoon light.With a subject like this, it’s important to remember that the sky should not be seen as a separate entity; it affects the whole of the landscape. Echoing the sky colours throughout the scene brings harmony and consistency to the painting. Here, note how the warm sky colour, mixed from Quinacridone Gold and Rose Madder, is reflected in the whitewashed wall and roofs of the building on the left and also in the sand and mud of the beach. The grey colour at the top of the sky, made by adding a mixture of Cerulean Blue and Rose Madder, suffuses the shadows and darks.Ôªø

Using a No.8 flat brush, I loosely mark in the form or the waves and ripples using a combination of ultramarine blue with a little yellow oxide and more titanium white. the I reinforce the shadows by using my original sea mix, ultramarine blue with a little yellow oxide and titanium white but I also add a little phthalo green into the mix too. I paint the sky with ultramarine blue and titanium white. In general I am trying to keep it simple with the colour mixing by using fewer colours. The benefits of this is that the colour mixtures look cleaner. For the whitewater that is in shadow I mix ultramarine blue with a little quinacridone magenta and titanium white. It was Durand-Ruel, the great patron of the Impressionist artists, who financially supported Monet, Pissarro and Boudin during their trip to London in 1870, a trip that continued with their stay in the Netherlands the following year. The English landscape did not impress Monet at first; and in fact he painted very few English landscapes, except those depicting the Houses of Parliament and River Thames, a subject that he would resume -in a more enthusiastic way- in subsequent visits. The truly decisive factor in Monet’s stay in London was his visit to the National Gallery, where he discovered the work of the greatest British landscape painters: John Constable and, above all, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s seascapes, with their effects of light and atmosphere, influenced Monet’s works of the following years. The vegetation of the boulder screes is also interesting in that it is often a mosaic of different vegetation types including rupestral, garigue, maquis, watercourse and coastal elements and is best termed an rdum assemblage.Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Corot were drawn to Varengeville—and eventually the Cubist artist Georges Braque, who became a resident in the village and since 1963 lies buried in the cemetery adjacent to the church. It was Braque who, at the suggestion of the then French minister of culture André Malraux, designed the wonderful stained-glass window depicting the Tree of Jesse in the choir of Saint-Valery. Between 1881 and 1883 Monet made a series of trips to several coastal towns in Normandy, such as Dieppe, Pourville or Trouville, where the landscapes were enough attractive to satisfy his creative appetite. Unlike in his former seascapes, here Monet seemed to focus more on the coastal landscape than in the ocean itself, taking advantage of the spectacularity of the rugged Normandy coast and its dramatic cliffs. Claude Monet: “Cliffs near Dieppe” (1882) – Zurich, Kunsthaus Almost all conventional seascapes are inevitably horizontally conceived, interpreting the horizon, the limit between sea and sky, as the key element in the composition. Many of Monet works from this period are unique for creating an asymmetrical vertical composition. A good example of this is “Cliffs near Dieppe” (1882, Zurich Kunsthaus Zurich) in which the two traditional horizontal planes (sky and sea) are broken by the dramatic cliff, dividing the composition into two vertical sections (land/cliff and sea). This effect is also notorious in “Beach of Etretat” (1883, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) or the famous “The Manneporte”, in its various versions, but it only reached its maximum effect in the series of paintings we are going to analyze now. Claude Monet’s L’Église de Varengeville, effet matinal (1882) Private collection Monet’s enduring legacy