Lilla Cabot Perry: Reminiscences of Monet, Pt. 5

"Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunset"
by Claude Monet

"One day Claude Monet referred to the many criticisms of his work, comparing it to worsted work and so forth, on account of his dragging the color onto the canvas with the long flexible brushes he had made to order for his own use. He said he was sure some of Rembrandt's pictures had been painted even more thickly and heavily than any of his, but that time with its leveling touch had smoothed them down. 

In illustrating this, he took out of one of the grooved boxes in which he kept his pictures of a view of the Rouen Cathedral that had been kept in the box practically ever since it had been painted, and put beside it one that had been hanging on the wall of his studio for some two or three years. The difference between the two was very marked, the one which had been exposed to the air and to the constant changes of temperature had so smoothed down in that short space of time that it made the other one with all its rugosities look like one of those embossed maps of Switzerland that are such a delight to children.

He said he had never really seen these Rouen Cathedral pictures until he brought them back to his studio in Giverny as he had painted them from the window of a milliner's shop opposite the cathedral. Just as he got well started on the series, the milliner complained bitterly that her clients did not care to try on their hats with a man about and that he must go elsewhere to paint, since his presence interfered with her trade. Monet was not to be daunted. He persuaded her to let him build a little enclosure shutting him off from the shop, a small cell in which he could never get more than a yard away from his canvas. I exclaimed at the difficulty of painting under such conditions, but he said that every young painter should train himself to sit near his canvas and learn how it would look at a distance, and that with time and practice this could be done. 

Monet had already had experience of this sort in painting on sixteen or more canvases one after the other for a few minutes at a time from his small boat on the Epte. Later on, in his water garden pictures he made good use of this same power. He had grooved boxes filled with canvases placed at various points in the garden where there was barely room for him to sit as he recorded the fleeting changes of the light on his water lilies and arched bridges. He often said that no painter could paint more than one half hour on any outdoor effect and keep the picture true to nature, and remarked that in this respect he practiced what he preached."

To be continued

(From "Reminiscences of Monet from 1889-1909" by Lilla Cabot Perry from The American Magazine of Art, March 1927, Vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 119-125.)