Lilla Cabot Perry: Reminiscences of Monet, Pt. 3

"Water Lilies" by Claude Monet

"Claude Monet was a man of his own opinions, though he always let you have yours and liked you all the better for being outspoken about them. He used to tell me that my forte was 'plein air,' figures out-of-doors and once in urging me to paint more boldly he said to me: 'Remember that every leaf on the tree is as important as the features of your model. I should like just for once to see you put her mouth under one eye instead of under her nose!' 'If I did that,' [I retorted]' 'No one would ever look at anything else in the picture!' He laughed heartily and said: 'Vous avez peut-etre raison, Madame [Maybe you are right]!' 

In spite of his intense nature and at times rather severe aspect, he was inexpressibly kind to many a struggling young painter. He never took any pupils, but he would have made a most inspiring master if he had been willing to teach. I remember his once saying to me; 'When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.'

He said he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him. He held that the first real look at the motif was likely to be the truest and most unprejudiced one, and said that the first painting should cover as much of the canvas as possible, no matter how roughly, so as to determine at the outset the tonality of the whole. As an illustration of this, he brought out a canvas on which he had painted only once; it was covered with strokes about an inch apart and a quarter of an inch thick, out to the very edge of the canvas. Then he took out another on which he had painted twice, the strokes were nearer together and the subject began to emerge more clearly."

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.)