Springtime by Claude Monet Canvas Print

Springtime by Claude Monet, oil on canvas 1872, is a landscape painting of a young woman in billowing white dress and white bonnet seated in the shade beneath a group of trees, reading a book. Around her the intense light of the warm spring sun breaks through the leaves of the trees, dappling the bright green grass and her dress with intense flecks of sunlight. Monet painted the image in quickly applied, loose brush strokes of oil colors, capturing a pastoral moment of repose of the woman amid nature. The range of values from light to dark and harmonies of green, brown, grey and white tones capture the light, color and atmosphere of a scene painted from life. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder and chief driving force behind the French Impressionist school of painting. Born in Paris, Monet studied with Eugene Boudin, who taught the basics of oil painting and plein-air (open air) easel painting, and later with painter Charles Gleyre, eventually befriending fellow Impressionists Manet, Renoir, Bazille and others. Rejected by the Paris Salon and other venues of the 19th century academic establishment, the Impressionists painted directly from nature, capturing fleeting moments in time, in bright, broken color and small, rapid brushstrokes. Monet lived and studied in London and Holland, producing many paintings, until the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where his painting Impression: Sunrise gained notoriety and earned the group its famous moniker. Following the death of his child and of his first wife Camille, Monet settled in Giverny, where increasing success allowed him to establish a home and studio surrounded by elaborate gardens. Monet painted many landscapes, including garden scenes and his famous Cathedral series, with increasing concerns for light, color and atmosphere, with a concern for color and shapes that in his older age bordered on a kind of abstraction, making him one of the most beloved painters of the modern era.