Monet: The Seine and the Sea 1878-1883 - Tapa blanda

Claude Monet was the most remarkable of all the Impressionist landscape painters. And perhaps at no point in his career was his work more varied than in the years between I878 and 1883. During this time he produced some three hundred and fifty paintings, many of them are amongst his finest works. His painting encompassed motifs of village and river, cliff and wave, as well as expressive portraits and rich still lifes. For much of this period Monet lived at Vétheuil, a village on the river Seine between Paris and the English Channel. In this tranquil setting, Monet painted in all semons. He tackled orchards in spring, expansive fields of corn, and the bare trees of the winter months. Among his most memorable paintings are those he made of the ice floes on the Seine during the great thaw of 188o. On the Normandy toast he painted views straight out to sea, as well as vistas of the beach and the sublime presence of the great diffs. Monet : The Seine and The Sea shows Monet the innovator, the daring Impressionist challenging his brush to record the shifting moods of nature, as well as Monet the competitor, taking on the example of previous painters and reshaping their motifs in his vigorously personal painting.

Richard Thomson is Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh.