Most easily recognize the author of the picture "Sunflowers", where the flowers are painted with twisted lines against a blue sky. This is Van Gogh. And who is the author of the flowers in the vase? Claude Monet.
The artist was not indifferent to flowers. This is evidenced by the garden in Geverny, created by his hands. Now it is there that the Claude Monet Museum is located, where visitors can admire not only art, but also living plants. By the way, the author considered his garden to be his best work. Even with brilliant paintings.
This is also the story of many of the artist's works, filled with flowers. True, the flowers standing in a vase are not found among his paintings so often. Most often, he preferred field and garden plants. In this case, they became part of the landscape, and not a still life. His relatives, for example, his wife, he also depicted surrounded by flowers. Monet even said that if it were not for the flowers, he would not have become an artist. It was they who inspired him to work.
True, still lifes with bouquets are also present in his work. Not in such quantity, but still tangibly - there are chrysanthemums, mallow, and anemones. But the artist’s most famous still life is Monet’s painting “Sunflowers”. A work of art is presented in the Metropolitan Gallery.
So different sunflowers
We can say that Monet laid the foundation for a series of paintings dedicated to these sunny flowers. Claude Monet's bouquet of sunflowers was created in 1881. And he was followed by a whole cycle of Van Gogh's sunflowers and a dying picture of Gauguin. Of course, the flowers of different artists vary in style and mood. The sunflowers of Monet and Van Gogh are cheerful, but something turbulent is already appearing in Van Gogh in a bright yellow background and broken lines of flowers. Although the period of life in which he painted these flowers was filled with new hopes for the artist, both mental illness and disagreements with Paul Gauguin influenced . By the way, Van Gogh has two whole series of sunflowers. They differ markedly.
But Gauguin's sunflowers are by no means joyful and not sunny, albeit yellow. This color is already dirty and rusty, and the flowers themselves are drooping, with randomly sticking out petals separated from each other. They express the artist’s fatigue from poverty and disease.
Impressionism is fate
Who is Claude Monet, what can be said about his biography and work? Like many creative people, his father did not dream of seeing his son as an artist. He predicted him a grocer's career. But the boy was partial to painting from a very young age. He often painted caricatures.
Then the young man had a chance to meet with Eugene Boudin, who showed the interested student several techniques of impressionist painting. At age 20, Claude was drafted into the army in Algeria, where he would have had to serve 7 years. There would be no happiness, but misfortune helped! Having contracted typhus after 2 years of service, the young soldier was demobilized.
Returning to his homeland, Claude Monet followed his dream - he entered the university at the Faculty of Arts. But his studies disappointed him. The approach to painting was outdated and foreign to the young artist. But Monet did not stop and found like-minded people. In the painting studio of Charles Gleyre, he met Renoir, Basil and Sisley. Together they became the founders of impressionism. By the way, this term is associated with the name of the artist, more precisely, with one of his paintings.
Word birth
The painting was called "Impression. Sunrise." One of the critics called the new direction in painting impressionism - from the French. impression - if you try to translate verbatim, you could call it "impressionism." On the lips of the critic, this sounded dismissive - he considered these artists frivolous people who are alien to depth and fundamentality.
However, the impressionists themselves liked the new word. It perfectly expressed the essence of their painting. After all, what is more truth - in the heavy traces of the ages or in the light moment - this is another question. Impressionists believed that nature is so changeable that it is important to grasp its colors at the moment. And the human soul is also changeable. Everything that we see and feel passes through the prism of our momentary mood. So the impression is made.
Large strokes
One of the signs of talent is being able to portray something simple in a way that is breathtaking.
Very interesting is the technique of painting, which tells a lot about the style of the artist. Claude Monet abandoned the clarity familiar to many generations. The picture was painted in large, blurry strokes. The whole picture seems to live and move. The pink-blue background is saturated with air and space, the tablecloth is crumpled, the leaves twist. Not a single flower is repeated, each has its own "pose" - its own spread, the bend of the petals. Some flowers are only vaguely discernible in the foliage, some resemble dandelions.
Play of color
In addition, his work with color is unusual. If you come closer, you can see that the color of the petals consists of a fairly contrasting colors. Shades of red, yellow, orange boldly lay on the canvas. But it is worth moving a little further and all this is neatly assembled into a single drawing.
Thanks to all these tricks, Monet's sunflowers come out dynamic, despite the fact that still life is one of the most static genres.
Accidental error
There is another feature that attentive spectators and art historians notice: in Monet's sunflowers there is a slight imbalance. It is unlikely that such an armful of flowers would fit in this narrow vase. But this is not a mistake, but rather artistic negligence. If you do not look at the picture with a corrosive, pedantic look, you will not notice this, because it looks harmonious. And the artist did not try to make each one believable. He concentrated on the main thing and thanks to this, the picture as a whole was lively and realistic. A small vase is depicted in order to give the entire space of the picture to sunflowers.