Paintings I love
Claude Monet (France, 1840 – 1926)
Les Rochers de Belle-Ile
Oil on canvas, 65.6 x 81.5
Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts
In Le Havre, where he spent his childhood, Claude Monet met Eugène Boudin who encouraged him to “make landscapes from nature” and took him with him to paint in the open air. In 1869, he decided: “What I will do will be the impression of what I will have felt. It is a canvas painted in 1872, “Impression, soleil levant”, which aroused the contemptuous label “impressionist” invented by the critic Louis Leroy. Monet is considered the leader of Impressionism. In the fall of 1886, the artist went to Brittany to paint the “wild coast” on the motif. He produced a series of thirty-nine canvases on Belle-Ile-en-Mer and its jagged coasts.
Monet pushes his sense of color to the extreme in this evocation of the Guibel rock. The strong contrasts between shadows and lights are rendered by the use of complementary and very bright colors in the sun-saturated areas: gradations of reds, pinks and greens in the foreground, gradients of yellows, mauves, blues and purples in the plane of the background, which prove that Monet knew the theories on the color of the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul.
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