The artists who followed Claude Monet were not innovators, but they created a distinctive colony around the Impressionist master, writes Lara Marlowein Giverny
Soon after Claude Monet moved to Giverny in 1883, he wrote to the art dealer Theodore Duret: "I am in ecstasy. Giverny is a splendid place for me." The first Impressionist painter remained there until his death in 1924.
The Norman village had the advantage of being close to Paris, and its location in the wide Valley of the Seine and proximity to the sea endowed it with unparalleled light. "The atmospheric conditions change quickly in Giverny," explains Katherine Bourguignon, the American-born curator of the exhibition, Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915.
'A CLOUDY SKY in the morning leads to a sudden shower, followed by sunshine," Bourguignon continues. "These brusque, unforeseeable interludes create infinite variations of light in the course of a single day. Some mornings, fog lies over the banks of the Seine and the Epte, and does not burn off until noon. The green fields, groves and gardens that thrive in this temperate climate inspired outdoor painters. The changing light presented a permanent challenge." The American painters Mary Cassat and Lilla Cabot Perry (whose severe self-portrait hangs in the exhibition) made Monet famous in the US before he was recognised in France - one reason so many of his masterpieces ended up in US museums.
Monet's friends Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissaro, Paul Cézanne and John Singer Sargent visited him at Giverny. The reputation of the village as a haven for artists spread, and foreign painters, three quarters of them American, flocked there.
In 1887, Angélina and Lucien Baudy turned their grocery store into a hotel. They built a tennis court out front, learned to make tea and Boston baked beans, sold artists' supplies and accepted paintings in lieu of rent. By 1890, there were 50 artists living in Giverny. In all, Bourguignon has determined from the hotel's records, 350 foreign artists from 18 countries came to Giverny over three decades. A surprising number were women, including Irishwoman Katherine MacCausland, who lived at the Baudy from July until November 1898.
The late American chemical magnate and patron of the arts Daniel Terra was so charmed by Giverny, which he first visited in the 1980s, that he sought out paintings by artists who lived there for his vast collection of American art. Terra inaugurated the Musée d'Art Américain in 1992, four years before his death. It is a discreetly designed modern building shrouded in white wisteria, just a stone's throw away from Monet's house and gardens, with their famous water lilies, conveniently open the same days and hours.
About half of the 90 paintings in this exhibition belong to the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for the Arts. The other half have been borrowed from museums around the world, to celebrate the museum's 15th anniversary.
For English-speakers, life at the Hôtel Baudy was not unlike a US campus, with picnics, costume parties and a handmade artists' newsletter called the Courrier innocent. Painters set up their easels side by side in the fields. Sometimes they even glimpsed the Great Man, though because of their invasion, Monet increasingly retreated into the walled garden of his home.
Monet befriended the early arrivals, including John Leslie Breck, considered the leader of the American Impressionists. In tribute to Monet's 1890-91 haystack series, Breck painted his own Studies of an Autumn Day; 12 square canvases showing exactly the same haystacks from dawn to mid-day to sunset and evening. The result is obviously inspired by Monet, but nonetheless original and modern.
"Breck took short cuts," explains Katherine Bourguignon. "By using the same size canvas, he didn't have to think about composition. The subject didn't matter; he was only painting the light." Breck fell in love with Monet's step-daughter Blanche Hoschedé, also a painter. But Monet didn't want his daughters to marry foreigners, especially not artists. The rejection broke their friendship, and Breck left Giverny for good. Six years later, Blanche married Jean Monet, Claude's son by his first marriage.
When another American painter, Theodore Butler, fell in love with another Monet step-daughter, Suzanne, Monet again opposed the union. Butler's fellow painters submitted a petition to the great painter. Gradually, his resistance wore down.
AFTER THE DEATH of his first wife Camille in 1879, Monet began living with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of his friend and ruined former patron Ernest Hoschedé, and their six children, as well as his own two sons. Ernest died in 1891, but it took the engagement of Alice's daughter Suzanne to Butler to prompt them to marry on July 16, 1892, four days before the younger couple. As her legal step-father, Monet was then able to give the bride away.
The marriage was recorded on canvas by Theodore Robinson, one of the finest American painters in Giverny. A poem in the Courrier innocent also commemorated the event: "Oh haste to the wedding, and let everyman/ Drink to Butler the lucky and lovely Suzanne/And eke to Giverny where all of us be/And remember dear friends that the drinks are on me." Continuing the almost incestuous tradition of the Monet family, when Suzanne died seven years later, Butler married her sister, Marthe.
ROBINSON WAS ALSO a photographer, painting from his own photographs, returning to the open air and his model only to make finishing touches. He took a rare photograph of the middle-aged Monet, dressed like a Normandy peasant with a felt hat, cane and wooden shoes.
Claude Monet, arguably France's greatest painter, is buried in the local churchyard in a large white marble tomb, overgrown with shrubbery and flowers, with the entire Monet-Hoschedé-Butler clan. The village is well preserved, but has managed to avoid becoming a Monet Disneyworld. The Hôtel Baudy is now a restaurant, with a US flag over the door.
The artists who came to Giverny were students, not innovators. Picasso was already a cubist when they were still painting poplar trees, haystacks and Giverny village. Yet these late, imported Impressionists enjoyed success in France as well as the US, where they exhibited together in 1910 as "The Giverny Group" or "The Luminists". Their notoriety continues to grow, with paintings often fetching more than $1 million at auction.
Three Monet paintings in the exhibition show the weakness of his followers. Monet's Fields of Poppies at Giverny hangs alongside a similar painting by Theodore Wendel. The American's canvas is decorative, but it lacks the energy and vibrancy of Monet's masterpiece.
After painting the surrounding countryside, first in the realistic style and earthy colours of the Barbizon school, then with the lighter touch of the Impressionists, the foreign artists turned to scenes of village life, a theme Monet seldom painted. The Czech painter Vaclav Radimsky was alone in painting a bleeding pig's carcass in the yard of the Hôtel Baudy. His Old Mill at Giverny, with its almost phosphorescent evening colours, has a distinctly central European feeling. The Czech national gallery lent the painting reluctantly, and will not allow it to move on to San Diego with the exhibition this summer.
Gradually, the first wave of bachelor painters gave way to a more settled colony of married artists with families. Chief among them were Mary and Frederick MacMonnies, both accomplished painters, who bought an old priory in Giverny where they raised two children. "The MacMonnies invited friends, and created a world within Giverny," says Katherine Bourguignon. "It was an idyllic, refined place, with concerts in the evening. Artists were no longer drawn by Monet; they came for the other painters."
The American artist Frederick Carl Frieseke was born in 1874 - the year after Monet painted the first Impressionist painting, Impression, soleil levant. A generation separated them. Frieseke launched the fashion of painting bourgeois women - clothed or unclothed - in gardens. Models in white dresses, surrounded by repetitive flower motifs, remind one of Frieske's Viennese contemporary, Gustav Klimt. Frieseke found France far freer than the US, to which he never returned.
Sophie Lévy, the curator of the Musée d'Art Américain in Giverny, says the American Impressionsists "understood some aspects of Impressionism, but not the most radical, such as high horizons, the dissolution of the motif, to the point where you can't tell what it is . . . They were interested in brushstrokes, colours, themes. But everything to do with the reconstruction of space was too challenging for their market. Many of them needed to sell their works. They were always considering the middle ground."
Impressionist Giverny; A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915 is at the Musée d'Art Américain in Giverny, 50 miles from Paris, until July 1 and at the San Diego Museum of Art from July 21 until Oct 1. Giverny is an hour by motorway north of Paris, or can be reached by train from the Gare St Lazare. Open Tues-Sun, 10am-6pm. Closed Mon. For further information, see www.maag.org. For accommodation in Giverny, see www.giverny.fr