Overview

Monet never travelled to Japan, but as anyone who has ever visited Giverny knows, he surrounded himself with a large collection of Japanese woodblock prints. As early as the 1870s, critics were writing about the influence of Japanese art on Monet's Impressionism. Monet & Japan shows how Japanese prints and paintings helped to shape Monet's art during six decades, influencing not only his style and subject matter, but the very way he saw the world around him. It focuses particularly on Monet's paintings of his pays, that part of France which he knew best, where he was born and brought up - the Seine Valley from Le Havre on the Norman coast and upriver, past his homes at Giverny, Vetheuil and Argenteuil, to Paris. The book is divided into four parts; in each Monet's paintings are hung in proximity to related Japanese art. The first part looks at Monet's use of 19th-century Japanese art to express modern experience of the city and the suburban countryside. The second explores the period when Monet moved away from Paris to Vetheuil and then Giverny, when he spent months on the coast painting the interaction between wind and waves, cliffs and rocks. Part three contains works painted in and around Giverny in the 1880s and 1890s. The final section suggests that Japanese screen paintings helped Monet attain profundity in his great series of paintings of his waterlily pool at Giverny.

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9780642541352

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Virginia Spate holds the Chair in the Department of Art History and Theory, University of Sydney. Among her many books is the highly acclaimed Claude Monet: The Colour of Time, published by Thames & Hudson.

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