Meadow in Bezons

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Meadow in Bezons (summer) (Claude Monet)
Meadow in Bezons (summer)
Claude Monet , 1874
Oil on canvas
57 × 80 cm
National Gallery, Berlin

Wiese in Bezons or Sommer ( French Prairie à Bezons ) is a painting by the French painter Claude Monet , created in 1874. The picture painted in oil on canvas has a height of 57 cm and a width of 80 cm. It belongs to the collection of the National Gallery in Berlin . You can see asummer landscape painted in impressionism stylenear Bezons near Argenteuil . The people depicted in the picture include Monet's wife, Camilleand their son Jean. Monet created a number of similar images in the area around Argenteuil in the 1870s depicting people from the city enjoying their rural leisure activities.

Image description

The painting Wiese bei Bezons shows a summer landscape in the Île-de-France . On a meadow in the Seine valley between Argenteuil and Bezons, Monet captured his wife Camille, his son Jean and another person on an excursion into nature. The composition is divided into several horizontal levels: In front there is a shady area with Camille sitting in the grass, at a distance behind the meadow with the other two people in bright sunlight, a blue chain of hills appears on the horizon and above the slightly cloudy "Radiant summer sky". The landscape, which is open on both sides, is only limited by the edges of the picture, which means that “the meadow seems to extend infinitely to the right and left”.

Monet painted the “heat-shimmering” meadow in thinly applied shades of yellow and green “with a short, comma-like brush stroke”. In contrast to the “glistening light” over the meadow, the mountains in the distance appear in the haze, which creates the overall atmosphere of a hot summer day. In the foreground are individual birches with thin branches and recognizable individual leaves. Further away there are more trees and a small group of trees. The trees, which are painted in different shades of green, sometimes look as if they were moved by the wind.

The people in the picture are arranged in a triangle to one another. In the foreground of the left half of the picture, Monet's wife Camille is sitting in the grass. He shows her in side view, with her back to the left edge of the picture. She wears a dress with a black top, white long sleeves and a wide white long skirt. A small, light-colored hat with black ribbons or feathers adorns the head to match the dress. The hat is pulled far forward over her forehead so that her face cannot be seen. Camille looks into a book open in front of her and seems to ignore the other people or the nature around her. On her left she has put down an open, green-covered parasol with the tip down. Behind the screen her son Jean is standing in the meadow some distance away. The tall grass covers the lower body of the approximately seven-year-old up to the waist. All you can see is his white shirt, a yellow summer hat and a light brown spot of color that suggests the face. In the middle of the picture to the right of the two, halfway between Camille and her son, there is another person who could be a nanny, as the art historian Dorothee Hansen suspects. This figure is also wearing light-colored clothes and a yellow summer hat. The face cannot be seen here either. Through the sketchy execution of the sitter, “everything genre-like is avoided”, as the art historian Angelika Wesenberg stated. Monet did not create portraits, but uses the people in the picture as staffage figures . The picture is signed and dated lower right “Claude Monet 74”.

Summer landscapes from Argenteuil

Claude Monet had lived with his wife Camille and their son Jean since December 1871 in Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris that could be reached by train in just 15 minutes from the center of the capital. In the 1870s, people from Paris came here mainly to relax on the weekends. The place had several places for excursions and the Seine offered opportunities for sailing or rowing boats. Claude Monet found numerous motifs for his landscape paintings here. In it he often showed the Seine and its banks, the bridges over the river and the houses of Argenteuil. In numerous pictures you can also find walkers, sailors or rowers. In the same year as Wiese in Bezons, for example, Monet painted the painting View of the Argenteuil Bridge ( Saint Louis Art Museum ) by painting his wife Camille and their son Jean walking on the banks of the Seine. In the background of the picture the Argenteuil railway bridge spans the river and behind it the steeple of the Basilica Saint-Denys d'Argenteuil can be seen.

1874, the year in which Monet created the painting Wiese in Bezons , is of particular importance in terms of art history. In the spring of that year, Monet and some of his friends exhibited their works in the studio of the photographer Nadar , as their paintings were repeatedly rejected by the official Salon de Paris . At this exhibition Monet showed the harbor view Impression, Sunrise from 1872 ( Musée Marmottan Monet , Paris), from which the art critic Louis Leroy derived the term Impressionism , which was initially intended as a mockery. Other critics were positive, such as Jules-Antoine Castagnary , who said: "They are impressionists in that they do not reproduce a landscape, but the impression that the landscape creates". Even if Nadar's exhibition was not a financial success, it brought the painter the desired attention.

After this first group exhibition by the Impressionists, the painters who were friends Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir visited Monet in Argenteuil in the summer of 1874 . They partially set up their easels side by side in Monet's garden and portrayed each other or painted Monet's family in the garden. Monet also created around 40 pictures that summer, often with motifs from the area around Argenteuil. This also includes the painting Meadow in Bezons , one of the few pictures "in which he completely turned away from the place and only depicted the great outdoors." In the meadow of Bezons, however, he neither shows a wilderness nor does he depict the meadow as Instead, the landscape painted by Monet is a “leisure place for the modern city dweller”. This is underlined above all by the depiction of Camille, who is recognizable in her fashionable dress as an elegant Parisian and who indulges in the leisure of reading a book.

Monet had already portrayed Camille with their son Jean in a meadow the year before. In the painting Poppy Field near Argenteuil ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris) the two of them stroll through a meadow with numerous blooming poppies, while in the background more strollers, trees and a house can be seen. In this picture, too, a parasol is an important accessory for a walk and, like the poppy flower, clearly refers to the warm season as the subject of the picture. Other day trippers in a meadow can also be found on works from 1875. In the painting Walk near Argenteuil ( Musée Marmottan Monet , Paris) a couple with a child walks through a meadow of flowers directly towards the viewer, in the work Poplars near Argenteuil ( Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ) a single figure can be made out in the midst of the meadow vegetation. His portrayal resembles that of Monet's son Jean in Wiese in Bezons . All these people are staffage figures and subordinate themselves to the representation of a landscape.

  • Claude Monet:
    View of the Argenteuil Bridge,
    1874

  • Claude Monet:
    Poppy field near Argenteuil
    1873

  • Claude Monet:
    Walk at Argenteuil
    1875

  • Claude Monet:
    Poplars at Argenteuil
    1875

reception

Monet showed the painting Meadow in Bezons under the title La Prairie ( The Meadow ) in the second group exhibition of the Impressionists, which took place from March 30 to April 30, 1876 in the rooms of the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in the Parisian Rue Le Peletier. The organizer was the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Engraveurs, etc. , of which Monet was one of the founding members. Various critics then praised Monet's meadow in Bezons . An unknown author with the initials "EF" wrote in the magazine Moniteur des artes that Monet's pictures were characterized by an "astonishing correctness of the color tones and a rare finesse". In his meadow in Bezons he “translated the air and space in a wonderful way”. Émile Zola also commented positively on the picture in the newspaper Le Sémaphore de Marseille and wrote: “It is of a simplicity and an exquisite charm. The fading of the green and blue tones in the strong sun conveys the intensity of blinding light. You can feel the pale gold of the star burning in the air ”.

In 1912, the art critic Karl Scheffler described Monet's meadow near Bezons as a “spring landscape” that was “all summer scent”. He continued: “Monet touches a limit of sensitivity; one step further, and landscape art is lost in the immaterial. ”Then he added:“ His picture is like a dream, in the two-tone of the blue-green sky and the golden-yellow meadow from which a green parasol shines like an emerald; But life is still there in all of its eternal reality in this art space. ”In 1967, the author Peter Krieger saw in the meadow in Bezons “ a transfiguration of the light-flooded Ile de France landscape. ”In 2017, the art historian Angelika Wesenberg arranged the painting Wiese in Bezons as "a program image of Impressionism".

Provenance

Monet probably offered the painting Wiese in Bezons for sale in 1875. Together with the artists Berthe Morisot , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley , he put a number of pictures up for auction at the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot . On March 24, 1875, a work Paysage ( landscape ) with the dimensions 60 x 80 cm was offered as lot number 6 , which was probably his painting Wiese in Bezons . Overall, the auction was not very successful. Monet himself bid on the Paysage work and auctioned it for 190  francs . Around 1876, Wiese in Bezons came into the collection of the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure , who acquired works by impressionist painters on a large scale. Faure sold the painting to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1906 . In the same year, the museum director Hugo von Tschudi bought the picture for the National Gallery in Berlin. Payment was made in February 1907. In September 1907, the picture was officially added to the Nationalgalerie's collection as a gift from the two bankers Carl Hagen and Karl Steinbart .

The meadow in Bezons first hung in the main building of the Nationalgalerie on Museum Island before it was exhibited in the New Department of the Nationalgalerie Berlin in the Kronprinzenpalais in 1919 . During the Second World War the stocks were relocated. After 1945, Monet's paintings, along with other works in the collection, first came to West Germany and in 1956 to the western part of Berlin. There it was first exhibited in the orangery of Charlottenburg Palace and from 1968 onwards in the Neue Nationalgalerie in the Kulturforum . After 1990, the separate museum holdings from East and West began to be merged. In this context, Monet's meadow in Bezons returned to the building of the Alte Nationalgalerie.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The German title Wiese in Bezons is given in Daniel Wildenstein's catalog of works, see Daniel Wildenstein: Monet, Catalog raisonné, catalog raisonné , vol. 2, p. 141. In the catalog of the Nationalgalerie, the title Sommer is mentioned, see Angelika Wesenberg: Malkunst in the 19th century: the collection of the Nationalgalerie , p. 628.
  2. ↑ Prairie à Bezons in Daniel Wildenstein: Monet, Catalog raisonné - catalog raisonné , vol. 2, p. 141.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Dorothee Hansen: Wiese in Bezons (summer) in Dorothee Hansen, Peter Bürger: Monet and Camille, Portraits of Women in Impressionism, p. 88.
  4. ↑ a b Peter Krieger: Painter of Impressionism from the National Gallery Berlin , p. 13.
  5. ^ Josef Kern: Impressionism in Wilhelminian Germany. Studies on the Art and Cultural History of the Empire , p. 180
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Angelika Wesenberg: Summer in Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, Peter-Klaus Schuster: Manet bis van Gogh, Hugo von Tschudi and the struggle for modernity , p. 98.
  7. ↑ a b Felix Krämer: Monet and the Birth of Impressionism , p. 24.
  8. ^ Quotation in German in Angelika Wesenberg: Summer in Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, Peter-Klaus Schuster: Manet bis van Gogh, Hugo von Tschudi and the fight for modernity , p. 98.
  9. ↑ Felix Krämer: Monet and the Birth of Impressionism , p. 14.
  10. ^ EF: Le Groupe de la rue Le Peletier in Moniteur des artes of April 21, 1876. Reproduced in Dorothee Hansen, Peter Bürger: Monet and Camille, Portraits of Women in Impressionism , p. 88.
  11. ↑ Émile Zola: Lettres de Paris: Autre correspondance in Le Sémaphore de Marseille of April 29, 1876. Reproduced in Dorothee Hansen, Peter Bürger: Monet and Camille, Portraits of Women in Impressionism , p. 88.
  12. ^ Karl Scheffler: The National Gallery in Berlin, a critical guide , p. 242.
  13. ↑ Angelika Wesenberg: Painting in the 19th century: the collection of the National Gallery . Vol. 2, L-Z, p. 628.
  14. ^ A b Daniel Wildenstein: Monet, Catalog raisonné - catalog raisonné , vol. 2, p. 142.