What Monet ate

Impressionism

Monet studied landscapes; Renoir studied people.

where the term "Impressionism" originated

Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise, 1873 

turning point

When outside art became respectable.

not painted in a studio

The Impressionists freed art from 1000 years of tradition.

unaffordable art

Impressionist at heart

La Fenêtre, 1925

Or was he a forward looking modernist?

Pierre Bonnard [1867-1947], "reveled in the wizadries of light and the surprises his own sensations held in store fore him."

The painter's art gives a human value to objects and reproduces things as they appear to a human eye. And this vision is full of changes, full of movement.

"Bonnard divided his time between the Mediterranean world of Renoir and the regions beloved of Monet, the Ile-de-France, the Seine valley, the Channel beaches."

From the Economist:

There was nothing of the romantic artist in a garret about Bonnard. He appeared to live a bourgeois life. His studio was a smallish upstairs bedroom; it didn’t even have an easel. He would just cut off lengths of canvas and tack them to the wall. When a picture was finished, he cropped off any remaining blank canvas.

Henri Matisse, his near contemporary, was a close friend; “Work Table”, finished in 1937, shows his influence. Like Matisse, Bonnard has been dismissively labelled a decorative artist, a painter of happiness. This exhibition should put an end to that. The 1946 “Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror” is almost terrifyingly bleak. “Bouquet of Mimosas”, painted the year before, offers no hope-filled, sweetly perfumed vision of early spring. Instead, it conjures up a deadly poison that seems to seep out of the flowers.

summer

Édouard Manet [1823-1883], Monet Painting on his Boat, 1874.

Monet had fitted up a small houseboat where he could work in peaceful isolation amidst all the colorful elements of nature he sought to record. When the sun got too hot, he stretched an awning from the cabin amidships to the small mast aft. Manet twice painted his friend at work in his floating studio; this is the brighter and livelier version. Seen sharply in profile in the foreground, wearing yellow flannel trousers and a white shirt with a dark tie, Monet paints the landscape in front of him. His wife Camille is seated in the doorway of the cabin.

- Albert Skira, Impressionism After 1873, 1959, p.34 

An earlier reference to Monet here.

father of Impressionism

Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878, celebrating Exposition Universelle.

- Claude Monet [1840-1926] founded Impressionism, which initiated the greatest change in art since the Renaissance.