Analysis Of The Impressionist Artwork "Garden At Saint-adresse" By Claude Monet

In this essay I will be analyzing Garden at Saint-Adresse, painted by Claude Monet. The piece was painted with oil on canvas while Monet enjoying a summer vacationing with his family at a seaside resort near Le Havre in 1867. The painting depicts his family enjoying the leisurely scenery and is currently being exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The painting features a garden terrace over-looking the boat filled glittering sea, with one couple seated and another appear to be chatting near the fence separating land from sea.

I will not only be discussing the fundamental artistic elements that the painting is comprised of, but also the context as an Impressionist artwork and the style itself as a reaction to previous artistic movements. Monet was considered to be the father of Impressionism in France – even coining the name from one of his earlier pieces, Impression, Sunrise – so I will discuss at how he leaded this movement, what art he was influenced by, and what the focus of this particular piece and movement as a whole were.

To begin, I will give a formal analysis of the Impressionist piece, Terrace at Sainte-Adresse by Claude Monet (French, Paris 1840–1926 Giverny), which can be viewed at the Metropolitan’s virtual museum. The most notable element is the contrast where opposite elements are juxtaposed to draw attention or create a sense of drama.

In the painting, Monet uses light and dark to create a visual or a blinding sun casting dark shadows, specifically on one woman’s parasol, the and the shadows casted by the shrubs in the garden. The right portion of the garden and the parasol appears slightly off-white, whereas the left portion of the garden and underneath the parasol both appear almost black where we can assume the sun is being blocked off. This amplifies the power of the sun and draws attention to the lighter areas of the painting and can be used to identify the focal point, typically described as the first part of piece that catches the audience’s attention. In this case, We are naturally drawn in by the almost white square at the bottom right of the garden to first notice the couple, specifically the bright parasol facing us, creating said point of interest.

Time is also implied in static works by seeming to capture multiple moments in just one frame usually through motion. Aided by the implied motion, defined in a two-dimensional work is the illusion of action taking place although the piece itself is froze, used to depict the choppiness of the waves as it is broken us by disorderly horizontal lines and the flags that appear to be billowing by their irregular form and shadows as if the wind were making them dance as if watching a scene unfold. These more organic lines, which are the base element for organizing all art and leading the viewers eyes, enliven the painting with a sense of dynamism.

There is also an implied line connected the main couple through the central shrub, the other couple and the solitary boat close to shore leading our eyes to the horizon and creating a stable rhythm for out eyes. Rhythm employed in art creates a visual “beat” that leads our eyes and maintains organization. Monet also implies depth, another attribute that is illusionary in two-dimensional works that gives them the appearance of three-dimensional work by suggesting volume or that the subjects are taking up actual space. Because Monet paints as if from a higher perspective, we are apple to process the foreground and background as different planes of space and perceive the sea in middle of the canvas as extending back to the horizon. He also utilizes atmospheric perspective to give the boats and strip of land less detail, relatively smaller size, and darker values to make them appear farther away. That being said, he also applies scale, or the relationship in size of multiple objects, to make the couple sitting down at the bottom the painting bigger than the couple on the edge of the terrace and the largest boat is the painted below the rest when he alludes to depth.

There is also a well-defined pattern to the boats in the horizon that start of smaller, clustered, and plentiful at the left side and slowly become more space out and larger as our eyes follow the horizon to the right. This pattern not aides in organization but also helps put the viewer at ease with a sense of consistency and even predictability. There is also a sense of balance, or equality of visual weight, if we were to cut the painting in half horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, the colors are almost equally blue in the upper half and a range of greens in the lower potion. Vertically the elements on either side and neither seems to overpower the other in terms of values or forms.

Next, I will provide context on Monet’s life leading up to, then specifically surrounding his creation of Terrace at Sainte-Adresse. Monet was born in Paris in 1840 but grew up in Normandy. He caught the attention of Eugéne Boudin who originally introduced him to landscapes as opposed to the caricatures that Monet was already well known for in the mid-1850’s. In 1862, after a year long military service cut short due to illness, he travelled to Paris and studied under Johan-Barthold Jongkind, another Landscape artist. Both Boudin and Jongkind had a great influence on him and resulted in many land and seascapes during his early years. He two seascapes showcased in the Salon of 1865, his first time submitting.

The following year, he began the famously unfinished project Déjeuner sur l’herbe which was life-size portrayal of an outdoor picnic that hie intended to submit to the Salon of 1868 but submitted other works due to being unable to complete it’s whopping almost 15x20 ft canvas. This highly elaborate project showed how motivated and committed Monet was to creating art outside. After that, he was rejected by the Salon in 1867, incidentally the year that Terrace at Sainte-Adresse was painted. This marked the year of many downfalls both personal and professional for the painter.

He also impregnated his mistress Camille Doncieux which led to ostracization from his father and who no longer supported him financially, eventually causing him to desert his mistress and seek refuge with his family in Le Havre. The stress effected his body and he suffered from temporary blindness that ultimately led him to artistic experimentation. It was during this time on while suffering poor vison that he created Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, which was greatly inspired by the atmospheric naturalism of Japanese prints that he was currently admiring. It is said that his own father and family were used as the model portrayed in this particular painting, making it especially personal. Monet was experiencing utter turmoil privately but painted a the leisurely - almost detached - scene perhaps imitating the subconscious calm that was absent at that point in time.

Finally, we will examine Monet’s Garden at Saint-Adresse under the context of the Impressionist Movement and how it has affected art, even today. The Impressionist Movement officially was birthed in France in the 1860’s due to the criticizing and excluding of it’s founding fathers’, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Armand Guillaumin, and Paul Cézanne from the notorious Salons. Their’s was a rebellious style that the government sanctioned Salon’s found combative with the idealized Western style of the times.

Terrace at Sainte-Adresse embodies a turning point in history for how artists interpret not only landscapes, but light itself. It also resembles the belief the Impressionist forefathers shared that painting did not have to capture nostalgia but that “everyday moments” were beautiful in their own right, which was deemed revolutionary. This ideology was a center of controversy because it contradicted the standard representation of nature “as a refuge and a place of freedom from the constraints of ordinary society,” and eventually led to the Impressionists holding independent exhibitions altogether. Terrace at Sainte-Adresse has impacted the world of art by leading into a more contemporary foothold with subjective understanding of how beauty is shown in a painting.

In conclusion, I think understanding the context of Garden at Saint-Adresse from a biographical and contextual perspective has great increased my respect for this painting and for Monet as a true pioneer. Aesthetically, the painting is pleasing and if you were to ask me with no background information, I would have never guessed that people had been insulted by it in the past. Now that I know the resentment shared between father and son at the time of it’s creation, I cannot stop myself from wondering how they interacted when Monet was painting him or if he even knew.

The more I learn about the piece, the more questions I have and what seemed tranquil at first glance, now reflects an underlying turbulence upon further inspection. I do agree with the movement away from the typical realistic and idealistic Western norms and moving in the direction of art being more subjective and eventually conceptual, rather than a concise depiction of beauty.