Picture making
To the right in the River Scene we
have two Landing-Stages. The small one in the bottom corner is the
first and was painted before the bank, (the outline-drawing is lying
on top). The bigger landing-stage has been painted very late,
probably it is one of the last elements and certainly: ”a response
to the demands of picture-making”, (John House: Nature into art.
P.180).
The landing stage
In the chapter: ”Monet’s Practice in Finishing”, John House
writes: ”The nature of Monet´s retouches can best be illustrated by
the touches whose function is less literally represational;
sometimes these involve giving an unexpected emphasis to a
particular element in the composition, such as part of an area of
foliage or open water, but sometimes they seem to have no starting
point at all in observed reality, serving simply to establish the
relationship between image and format, or as visual passages between
elements in the painting. Two examples occur in ”Flower Beds at
Vétheuil” ,(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), :a few red touches , on
the hillside just to the right of the upper area of flowers, link
the pinks of the hillside to the stronger reds of the flowers; on
the right of the painting a sequence of dark green dabs floats above
the main block of flowers, with a particularly prominent one at the
right edge, exactly half way up the margin. (!) Like the red touches
these link foreground and background, but they also tie in the right
margin, preventing the horizontal of the river from flowing
uninterrupted out of the picture.The green accents belong, in form
and colour, with the treatment of the main mass of flowers, but
Monet has allowed them to float independent of it on the picture
surface.”
John House continues giving examples how ”Monet added retouches
of varied sorts near the margins of his paintings. ” whereafter he
remarks: ”Accents such as these may all have had some basis in
observed reality; but the emphasis he gave them was a response to
the demands of picture-making”
Back to our Landing-Stage - we have just read that Monet added
the green daub at: ”exactly half the way up the margin” – we are not
very astonished finding that our Landing-Stage goes exactly half the
way up the margin. It is not hard to understand, that without it,
the composition would have lost it’s balance but it also: " ties in
the right margin, preventing the horizontal of the river from
flowing uninterrupted out of the picture.”
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John House also illustrates Monet’s late
retouches with the painting ’The Train in the Snow’, 1875, (W 356),
Musée Marmottan. Here the fence to the right is added late. It
certainly is a ’fence’ for our eyes. The signature and the dark
daubs above serve the same purpose.
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HERE for a comparison. |
In conclusion it certainly is obvious that our
River Scene really is "The Missing Link". Now it is easy to follow
the evolution of the ideas around the Boating Scenes. The River
Scene has, with good help from X-ray & IR, proven to be an
archive of ideas, a real melting-pot for new experiments.
We have already seen the result of all the
efforts and ´the end´ of the link ’The Blue Barque’ and ’Young Women
in a Boat’. These paintings make the link complete and we have
really discovered the important part that is played by our River
Scene – The Missing Link!
John House writes in his
‘Nature into art’:
“In all of them, the boat is
placed asymmetrically, in some it is cut by the margin of the
canvas, in a way that is reminiscent of the placement of boats in
Japanese colour prints. The scale of the pictures suggests that they
were planned as an ambitious commercial venture, but Monet was
unable to complete any of them for sale at the time of their
execution. Monet’s ambitions to treat his figures like landscapes
suggests that the figure paintings were, at least in part, executed
out of doors. But the size of the boating pictures, and the
existence of rapid compositional drawings relating to several of
them, suggest that they involved a more complex process than Monet’s
landscapes.
Moreover, unpeopled canvases
of the meadows exist which correspond closely to the settings of
some of the meadows with figures of 1888, this suggests that,
whatever his original intentions, all of these figure paintings may
have involved some sort of additive, synthetic working process.”,
(Chapter 2, p.37).
It is quite amusing to read what House is writing here, when we
know that the boat was lying ’assymmetrically’ towards the bank in
the first state. And how it is ’cut by the margin’ today. This is
nothing but another evidence of the complexity of Monet´s Oeuvre,
and not only a curiosity.
As we have seen, The River-Scene reveals a lot of other important
ideas, such as the sunshine under the boat and the masterly created
depth dimension.The sun-mingled willow-leaves. Even the sunshine
through the arches of the bridge (in the first version) is
foreboding a lot of forthcoming masterpieces. We also remember the
fundamental formula of building the picture in the comparison with
’Effet d’ automne à Argenteuil’.
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