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<div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919"><em>Argenteuil, l’Hospice</em> from 1872 belongs to one of the most formative chapters in Claude Monet’s career, painted during his early years in Argenteuil where he created nearly one hundred eighty canvases between 1871 and 1878. First owned by Paul Durand Ruel, Monet’s dealer and the most important champion of the Impressionists, the painting is included in the Wildenstein catalogue and was featured in the National Gallery London’s landmark exhibition <em>Monet and Architecture </em>in 2018. Created in the same year as his breakthrough <em>Impression, Sunrise</em>, the work reflects the moment when Monet’s vision for modern landscape took shape and laid the foundation for the movement that would soon be known as Impressionism.</font></div>
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<br><div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919">Monet settled in Argenteuil in late 1871, determined to renew his artistic direction after the upheavals of war and exile. The town offered an enticing blend of historical architecture, modern industry, rustic gardens, and the ever-shifting Seine, all within easy reach of Paris. The Aubrey House, where Monet lived, became a gathering place for Renoir, Manet, Sisley, Caillebotte, and later Pissarro, a setting that fostered both artistic exchange and the planning of the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. As scholar Paul Hayes Tucker has noted, Argenteuil offered Monet a rare diversity of motifs that he encountered daily, ranging from the charmingly old to the strikingly new.</font></div>
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<br><div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919">In this painting Monet set his easel on rue Pierre Guienne, with his back to the Aubrey House, and painted the seventeenth century building that served at the time as the hospice of the Porte Saint Denis. The structure appears at right, viewed from the Seine, rendered with a quiet clarity that captures the atmosphere of an early spring day. The palette reflects both a reverence for the site’s history and an appreciation for Eugène Boudin, the friend and mentor who had encouraged Monet to paint the play of air and light years earlier and who joined him for a housewarming at Argenteuil on January 2, 1872. The hospice later became the Musée du Vieil Argenteuil, further reinforcing the historical resonance of the site.</font></div>
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<br><div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919"><em>Argenteuil, l’Hospice</em> stands as one of Monet’s earliest paintings from this crucial period and offers a faithful, atmospheric interpretation of a place deeply intertwined with the origins of Impressionism. Its blend of gentle tonalities, soft spring light, and direct observation reveals the artist’s growing confidence in painting the world as he perceived it, moment by moment, as a new vision for modern landscape art emerged.</font></div>
FEATURED
CLAUDE MONET
Argenteuil, l’Hospice
1872
20 x 25 5/8 in.
oil on canvas

<div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919">As the idea of using drawings, whether in pencil or pastel to prepare a painting was at odds with Monet’s publicised creative process, he tended to downplay its importance in his work. However, after his death eight folios containing over four hundred drawings came to light as well as many pastels. This convenient and lightweight medium allowed him to experiment with composition and colour and develop ideas for his oil paintings at speed. He also used pastel to produce finished pictures, as in this example.</font></div>
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<br><div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919">During the 1880s Monet returned to the Normandy coast. He found inspiration in the sparkling light and famous limestone cliffs, as had Delacroix and Courbet. As well as working directly in oils, he followed Boudin’s example and used black chalk and pastel to study the effects of light and colour on the sky, sea and land.</font></div>
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<br><div><font face=Lato size=3 color="#191919">In this seascape at Etretat, twenty miles round the coast to the north of Le Havre, Monet has chosen an unusual composition, dividing the landscape down the centre with the vertiginous cliffs; the left half of the picture composed of earthy greens and browns, the right half a sun dappled sea that dissolves into the sky, the horizon only suggested by the lightest touch of charcoal. This picture has a marked difference in atmosphere to another pastel of the nearby Porte d’Aval, dateable to the same period, whose late afternoon sky shows the range of expression that could be achieved with pastel. By the summer of 1885 the year he made this pastel Monet had largely abandoned urban subjects, and was more drawn towards natural phenomena. He painted many views along the coast under different light conditions. As noted in the catalogue raisonné on Monet, this pastel is not a preparatory study for an oil painting, but a wholly original composition. It demonstrates how well the painter understood and enjoyed the versatility of the medium when trying to capture such variable weather.</font></div>
CLAUDE MONET
Étretat, le Cap d’Antifer
c. 1885
10 1/2 x 13 3/8 in.
pastel on paper mounted on board

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