“Garden at Sainte-Adresse” by Claude Monet

“Garden at Sainte-Adresse” by Claude Monet was painted in the summer of 1867 at the resort town of Sainte-Adresse on the English Channel, near Le Havre, France. Monet depicted a garden with a view of Honfleur.

The garden is located on the southern bank of the estuary of the Seine across from Le Havre. Monet combines smooth, traditional rendering with sparkling passages of rapid, separate brushwork, and spots of pure color.

The figures are assumed to be family members consisting of Monet’s father, Monet’s cousins, and their father. Although the scene projects a comfortable family setting, Monet’s relations with his father were tense.

His father disapproved of Monet’s liaison with Camille Doncieux. Camille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean, in 1867. Monet and Camille married in 1870.

The composition’s flat horizontal bands of color are reminiscent of Japanese color woodblock prints. There is a print by the Japanese artist Hokusai that may have inspired this picture.

The Japanese print remained part of Monet’s personal collection to the end of his life. Japanese color woodblock prints were avidly collected and studied by Monet and other artists of the time like Manet, Renoir, and Whistler.

The elevated perspective and relatively even horizontal areas emphasize the two-dimensionality of the painting. The composition seems to rise parallel to the picture plane instead of receding into space.

The tension from the combination of illusion and the two-dimensionality of the surface is an essential characteristic of this artwork.

Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting Impression, “Soleil Levant” or “Impression, Sunrise,” which was exhibited in 1874.

Monet adopted a method of painting in which he painted the same scene many times to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons.

Monet is known for having produced a series of paintings, all versions of the same subject and perspective. Examples include his series of the “Valley of the Creuse” series and his famous series of “Haystacks” and “Water Lilies” paintings.

From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where at his home, he developed a garden landscape that included the lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works.

In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in the series of large-scale paintings, with the water lilies as the main feature. This series occupied him for the last 20 years of his life.