Ameixas e Damascos (Prunes et Abricots) - Claude Monet

 

Ameixas e Damascos (Prunes et Abricots) - Claude Monet
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OST - 18x38 - Circa 1882-1885


Painted in the 1880s, this vibrant depiction of plums and peaches demonstrates the artist's ability to adapt his technique, developed through painting en plein air, to a different genre. He painted the present work paying close attention to capturing the effects of light, setting a plate of fruit against a neutrally coloured background suggestive of a table top. Monet combined this natural display with quick, fluid brushstrokes that lend the painting freshness and a sense of spontaneity. Discussing Monet’s still lifes, Stephan Koja describes his ‘unconventional and unpretentious approach to his subjects’, writing: ‘There is nothing artificial about his arrangements, nor are they welded to a spatial context. [...] Once again, he relied entirely on the effect of colour, endeavouring to apply the stylistic vocabulary he had evolved in his landscape paintings, with its typical short brush-strokes’ (S. Koja in Monet (exhibition catalogue), Belvedere, Vienna, 1996, p. 92).
The 1880s were, in part, years of great change for the artist. Following the death of his wife Camille in 1879, Monet settled with Alice Hoschedé and their children in Poissy in 1881. Following years of financial hardship, Monet was now able to sell paintings to the Paris-based dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who had become aware of his work at the Impressionist exhibitions of the late 1870s. In May 1882, Durand-Ruel commissioned a unique group of works for the grand salon of his apartment at 35, rue de Rome in the eighth arrondissement. The project envisaged thirty-six decorative panels depicting flowers and fruit to adorn the six double doors of his drawing room. Prunes et abrictos was not in fact intended as one of the thirty-six panels, but painted in its own right at the same time, its format similar to that of the central panel of the doors.
The Durand-Ruel commission occupied Monet from 1882 to 1885, and the set of charming still lifes were sufficiently important for him to spend considerable time and energy on their completion. As he wrote in a letter to Durand-Ruel: ‘To finish these panels, how many did I need to destroy. More than twenty, perhaps even thirty’. Unlike the examples that the artist felt compelled to destroy, he was evidently satisfied with the present composition, which he considered a complete painting in its own right, and which Durand-Ruel purchased and later exhibited at his New York gallery in 1935.
In addition to the financial success of still lifes, Monet was similarly aware of the art historical significance of the subject matter. While pictorial representations of objects existed from Antiquity, it was not until the Renaissance that the subject became a genre in its own right. Artists such as the eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, were particularly noted for mastering this genre and elevating its status to co-exist with traditionally more highly ranked subjects such as portraiture or history painting. Modern masters such as Paul Cézanne, used still lifes as the basis for their formal experimentation, in Cézanne’s case, for his investigation of perspective. It was only a few years later in 1887, when van Gogh visited Paris, that he was taken by this subject matter and produced his own rendition of the motif, leaning heavily on Cézanne’s lessons in perspective.
Monet’s ever present search for spontaneity and desire to capture the atmosphere around an object in addition to the object itself, means that his works present some of the most radical challenges to the long-standing still life tradition. Discussing these works, John House writes, ‘In these paintings, Monet explored various ways of breaking down the traditional rigidity of the genre. Fruit is scattered informally across table tops which are tipped up toward the viewer, creating a rich weave of color and texture. Courbet's fruit still-lifes of the early 1870s had rejected more conventional arrangements in order to emphasise the physical palpability of the fruit itself, but it was Monet's still-lifes of around 1880 that more systematically undermined the conventions of the then-dominant Chardin tradition [...] Monet played down the physicality of the objects in favor of emphasizing their optical effect, with the informality of their grouping suggesting that this effect has been rapidly perceived, rather than carefully ordered’ (J. House, Monet: Nature into Art, New Haven, 1986, p. 42).
Monet experimented with still-life painting at various intervals during his career, beginning as early as 1872, yet his most extensive and searching foray into the genre occurred during the three-and-a-half years that he lived at Vétheuil, from August 1878 until December 1881, and during the Durand-Ruel commission. This was a decisive period of artistic reassessment and renewal for Monet, who was then entering middle age. At Vétheuil, he entirely abandoned the scenes of modern life and leisure that had dominated his work previously at Argenteuil and began to focus instead on conveying the most fugitive elements of light and colour. In his still lifes of this period, likewise, his foremost goal was to capture the highly dynamic surface effects that were created as light flickered over arrangements of fruit and leaves. As Richard Thomson writes: ‘Monet painted such canvases with a flourish, confident in his ability to animate any still-life motif with the vivacity of his brushwork, unity of his light, and coherence of his chromatics’ (R. Thomas, in ibid., p. 76).