Escape from the Salon: Claude Monet (I)

Editor’s Note: This article is first in a two-part series on the life of Claude Monet. Special thanks to reader Bette for the topic suggestion.
CLAUDE MONET (1840–1926) was born in Paris but spent his childhood in the bustling port city of Le Havre, where his father and uncle ran a successful grocery business. There, young Claude would encounter a painter who, in the course of one afternoon, changed his understanding of art and artistry forever. The painter was Eugène Boudin, who one day took Monet “out into the countryside not far from town,” explain Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge in their book, Monet. The senior artist “pitched his easel and began to work, watched by a skeptical Monet. Suddenly it was as if a veil had been lifted.” As Monet would later recall:

I had understood, I had seen what painting could be, simply by the example of this painter working with such independence at the art he loved. My destiny as a painter was decided.

Contemporary painters would have been puzzled to hear Monet praise the concept of independence, for the very reason that ARTISTIC INDEPENDENCE was simply a way of life. At no other time in the history of France had artists operated with so few rules and regulations. During the nineteenth century, reports Alden Gordon in Grove Art Online, French society witnessed the “general decline in aristocratic and private patronage, the continuing secularization of society and the increasing acquisition of art through a market rather than by commission.” Instead of receiving a dependable series of commissions from a church or a nobleman—and encountering the classicizing constraints that such work would offer—French artists were now free to paint whatever kind of pictures they liked and then sell them to whomever they pleased.

“Un Coin du Salon en 1880,” Édouard Dantan (1880). A painter's depiction of the crowded Salon in Monet's day.

BUT FREEDOM OF THIS SORT would hardly have seemed a thing worth celebrating. Alden Gordon’s reference to a “market” is merely our first indication that the artistic independence was accompanied by strong COMPETITIVE PRESSURE. For much of the century, the greatest source of this pressure was the annual art exhibition at the Salon in Paris, sponsored by the country’s official Academy of Fine Arts. Although the Salon had been established well before 1800, only in the nineteenth century did the jury which approved—or denied—submissions to the exhibitions come to have such immense power in determining the “worth” of an artist’s style. Boasting over one million annual visitors by 1850, the Salon was the hub of the new art market and attracted dealers and critics from every corner of the world.

“French artists understood that the government’s official Salon was the sole means of having their work presented to the public in a setting that would assure critics and collectors of its worth,” explains David Galenson in his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses. Galenson is an economist at the University of Chicago who has undertaken an empirical investigation into the connection between artistry and style within the visual arts.

As regular readers of About the Artist will perhaps expect, the artistic independence and competitive pressure faced by the French painters caused a great deal of MAXIMALISM. At a time when careers were made and broken by a jury’s decision or a collector’s whim, painters naturally began to conceive of their style in terms of its “market value.” Canvas dimensions grew wider, subject matter more highbrow and dramatic—anything to make one’s paintings seem more auspicious than the rest. Consider what Monet’s friend and fellow painter Frédéric Bazille had to say in 1866:

To be noticed at the expositions, it is necessary to make rather large paintings that require very conscientious studies and, consequently, a great deal of funds—without which it can take ten years to get talked about, which is discouraging.

Most ironic was that this competitive environment caused the works displayed in the Salon to remain remarkably similar in style. Despite their supposed artistic independence, artists found it all but mandatory to match the style of their work to the prevailing tastes of the market—even as their portraits, landscapes, or scenes from mythology grew in size and splendor.

For those wondering whether the strict demands of the Salon represent an external constraint, allow me to assert that nothing could be further from the truth. True external constraints (for instance, a fixed canvas size) are scarcely concerned with the stylistic or aesthetic outcome of an artwork and yet will encourage craftsmanship and creativity in the artist, leading ultimately to the development of a new classical style. In contrast, the spoken and unspoken rules of the Salon governed directly the style in which the French painters worked, prodding them to produce “bigger and better” paintings in the style of those currently in fashion.

“Camille,” or, “La Femme à la Robe Verte,” Claude Monet (1866).

THE MAXIMALIST CULTURE of the Salon can hardly be what Monet had had in mind when, as a youth, he had admired his mentor for painting “with such independence.” The young painter attempted to impress the Salon jury for several years, not without a measure of success: among his accepted submissions from 1866 was a painting of his future wife, Camille (right). But in the end, Monet came to acknowledge that the competitive pressure of this Parisian popularity contest was not exactly what he’d signed up for.  In the book Monet: Impressions of Light, the art historian Henri Lalleman records several of the painter’s more desperate remarks of 1868: “My painting doesn’t go, and I definitely do not count any more on fame . . . I’ve become utterly lazy, everything annoys me as soon as I make up my mind to work.” At a recent exhibition in his home city of Le Havre, he had “sold nothing. I possess a silver medal (worth 15 francs), some splendid reviews in local papers, there you are; it’s not much to eat.”

. . . continued in To Paint, To Live: Claude Monet (II)