Monet's Eye

There was a third source of inspiration, and not the least of the three, from which the master drew strength: his eye. Monet's eye was perhaps the best of his century, for it was keen, curious, intelligent and educated to the discipline of the disintegration of colours into an incredible number of nuances. It rendered great services to the Impressionistic experiment and it dominated the painter. It made demands on him, for example lightness of palette. It could not suffer darkness.

Jacques Emile Blanche describes how Monet would sit watching the sea breaking on the shore at Dieppe, its foam wetting his beard, until darkness drove him away. The dusk, night, the dark naves of cathedrals filled him with fear. Once when he was in the dark, he asked a friend to speak to him and said: "When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more."

By "I" he meant his own eyesight. Perhaps his love of light was due to the fact that at one time he was in danger of losing his sight, which was saved only by means of an operation. And it was with his eye that he painted, with atoms of coloured splinters. His eye did not worry about the conflict between the creative and the poetic sides of his genius. It sought to achieve mastery in the service of a principle, and it dominated both his tendencies. These it did not need, for it sufficed for it to be allied with taste. With his eye and his taste and the hand of a great virtuoso, Claude Monet created those works which "the world" admired so much, the eight wall-pictures of water-lilies in the Tuileries museum.

These pictures have no soul and no heart; nor have they any real poetry; they are too sweet for that. Nevertheless they are remarkably beautiful. Not in the sense of great art, but in the sense of conspicuous ability, not in the sense of the traditions of great painting, but in that of "haute couture", which could draw matchless inspiration for cloths, shawls and hats, sufficient to lost for centuries, from the remarkable taste in colour here displayed. They are eminently French, not in the spirit of Notre-Dame or the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but in the sense of the 16th Arrondissement. They might form incomparable models for the mural decoration of salons and drawing-rooms.

There is no doubt that Impressionism brought with it an enrichment of the means available for painting. But this excursion into the open air and the sunlight was a costly undertaking for those who took part in it. Through it Manet lost the crown of his genius, while Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, each to a greater or less degree, sacrificed the possibility of further developing their great gifts.

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