.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Suffused by warm sunlight and soft shadows, Claude Monet’s Le Parc Monceau is a masterful study of the play of natural light within the landscape. Showcasing the sophistication of the artist’s Impressionist technique, it is one of a trio of compositions depicting the verdant Parc Monceau in Paris that Monet painted during the first half of 1878, offering intriguing views of the lush greenery, bustling promenades, and secluded corners of this carefully cultivated public garden. Filled with a richly nuanced play of colour, each stroke of pigment picking out details within the foliage, the painting provides a window into the changing urban environment of Paris during these years, a subject that captivated Monet and his fellow Impressionists throughout the period.
The urban landscape of Paris had been utterly transformed in the 1860s from a medieval city of winding streets and historic buildings, to a paragon of modernity and elegance, as part of the ambitious reforms of Napoleon III. Led by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the rebuilding project saw vast sections of the congested city demolished to provide space for expansive new thoroughfares, grand public buildings, apartment blocks of a uniform architectural style, as well as new sewer and water systems. Perhaps most notably, Haussmann was charged with adding a wealth of new public gardens to the capital, reportedly drawing inspiration from the network of large parks and squares that permeated London. To this end, more than thirty new green spaces were opened for the denizens of Paris to enjoy, while a selection of existing gardens and neighbourhood squares throughout the city were sensitively renovated and restored by a team of dedicated specialists.
Situated on the boulevard de Courcelles, in the fashionable eighth arrondissement of Paris, the Parc Monceau was among these revitalised gardens, having originally been established by Phillippe d’Orléans, Duc de Chartres, in the late eighteenth century. Inspired by the gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, the Duc commissioned Louis Carrogis Carmontelle to design a free-form garden in the English tradition, replete with a collection of follies and water features. The Parc Monceau quickly became renowned for its innovative planting scheme and whimsical, picturesque architecture, and was among the first and most influential gardens in France designed à l’anglais. While the park underwent certain renovations after the French Revolution, it had remained largely untouched through the ensuing decades, before being boldly reshaped by Haussmann’s renovation plans. Acquired by the city circa 1860, a portion of the land was sold off for the development of lavish town houses, and the remaining space reworked into a dynamic, intriguing garden. New lawns were laid, sweeping promenades and picturesque pathways established, the existing grottoes updated and embellished, and a variety of tropical plants added to the flowering beds, from tree ferns and banana plants, to yucas, agaves and caladiums.
A keen gardener, Monet would no doubt have been intrigued by these changes, and the wealth of unusual plant specimens on view. He had first been drawn to this urban oasis in 1876, most likely through the encouragement of his patron Ernest Hoschedé, where he executed a concentrated series of three canvases (Wildenstein, nos. 398, 399 and 400), the newly finished elegant townhouses along the periphery glimpsed through the foliage. Returning two years later, the artist undertook another trio of paintings devoted to the Parc Monceau, this time drawing the viewer further into the heart of the garden, immersing them in its quiet, secluded atmosphere. In 1878, Monet was living just a short walk away on the Rue d’Edimbourg in the Quartier de l’Europe, with his young family. The artist had settled there in January of that year, and would have been able to closely observe the beautifully maintained park as it entered its springtime bloom and progressed into its full summer growth.
Intriguingly, in the present Le Parc Monceau, Monet does not focus on the large-leafed, exotic plants that had been recently introduced to the gardens, instead training his eye on the dense flowering shrubbery, lush grass and full trees that make up the essential fabric of the park, each rendered in subtly variegated shades of green. Situating himself in the midst of the foliage, in what seems to be a painter’s blind, set at a distance from the principal pathways and thoroughfares, Monet is able to observe the play of life within the garden, while he himself remained partially hidden from view. The artist often favoured compositional devices that allowed him to view distant objects through a screen or a frame. Here, the silhouettes of a group of fashionable figures are just glimpsed through the bushes and trees in the middle ground, the tones of their elegant, modish outfits standing-out among the verdure.
Unlike his paintings of the Tuileries Gardens (Wildenstein, nos. 401-404) – which presented an expansive aerial view of the strictly formal gardens, seen from the balcony of Victor Chocquet’s fourth floor apartment – Monet’s visions of the Parc Monceau fully immerse the viewer in the vibrant vitality of the park, allowing the vegetation to envelope them. While the majority of this concentrated series showcase the social side of the garden, depicting it as a site for recreation and promenading, with an array of well-to-do figures circulating along the pathways or resting on a park bench in the shade, the present view eschews such details, and instead revels in the verdant beauty and fecundity of nature. Using flickering, quick brushwork to describe the texture of the foliage and the dappled play of light, Monet imbues the composition with a vivid sense of spontaneity and energy, forms coalescing and dissipating as the eye moves through the scene, mimicking the sensation of being in the garden and absorbing the richness of the setting.
Shortly after its completion, the present Le Parc Monceau was acquired directly from Monet by one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of Impressionism – Georges de Bellio, a Romanian-born physician with a considerable family fortune behind him. An innately curious figure with an abiding passion for art, De Bellio appears to have first come across the Impressionists in late 1873 or early 1874, just prior to the opening of the inaugural Impressionist exhibition that spring. Through the ensuing years, he cultivated close friendships with many of the leading figures of the movement, regularly providing essential financial support to different members of the group. As Renoir recalled, ‘Every time one of us had a pressing need for 200 francs, he ran to the Café Riche at the lunch hour. There one was sure to find Mr. De Bellio, who would buy, without even looking at it, the painting one brought him’ (quoted in A. Vollard, Renoir, 1919, p. 71).
De Bellio acquired his first Monet painting at auction in January 1874, marking the beginning of a decades-long journey that would see him develop an extraordinary collection of contemporary avant-garde art. On the walls of his apartment, works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, and Morisot were hung side by side with important canvases by Sisley, Pissarro, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Monet was among the best represented painters in the collection, with almost sixty works by the artist recorded in De Bellio’s possession at one time or another, including his famed early masterpiece, Impression, soleil levant (Wildenstein, no. 263; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris). An abundance of letters and correspondence between Monet and De Bellio also reveal their close and enduring friendship, which provided the artist with an important source of solace and support during some of the most difficult years of his personal life.
In 1876, De Bellio had chosen another of Monet’s paintings of the Parc Monceau directly from the artist’s studio (Wildenstein, no. 398; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Considered in this light, the present view of the gardens may have been painted by Monet to complement the earlier canvas in his friend’s collection. De Bellio most likely loaned the present Le Parc Monceau to the Fourth Impressionist exhibition, which opened on 10 April 1879 at 28, avenue de l’Opéra, Paris. The event included twenty-nine paintings by Monet in a mini-retrospective of his career thus far, with works dating from 1867 right up to his most recently finished canvases. Among the group were a selection of the artist’s views of the newly renovated Paris, together showcasing the inherent modernity of Monet’s vision.
The urban landscape of Paris had been utterly transformed in the 1860s from a medieval city of winding streets and historic buildings, to a paragon of modernity and elegance, as part of the ambitious reforms of Napoleon III. Led by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the rebuilding project saw vast sections of the congested city demolished to provide space for expansive new thoroughfares, grand public buildings, apartment blocks of a uniform architectural style, as well as new sewer and water systems. Perhaps most notably, Haussmann was charged with adding a wealth of new public gardens to the capital, reportedly drawing inspiration from the network of large parks and squares that permeated London. To this end, more than thirty new green spaces were opened for the denizens of Paris to enjoy, while a selection of existing gardens and neighbourhood squares throughout the city were sensitively renovated and restored by a team of dedicated specialists.
Situated on the boulevard de Courcelles, in the fashionable eighth arrondissement of Paris, the Parc Monceau was among these revitalised gardens, having originally been established by Phillippe d’Orléans, Duc de Chartres, in the late eighteenth century. Inspired by the gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, the Duc commissioned Louis Carrogis Carmontelle to design a free-form garden in the English tradition, replete with a collection of follies and water features. The Parc Monceau quickly became renowned for its innovative planting scheme and whimsical, picturesque architecture, and was among the first and most influential gardens in France designed à l’anglais. While the park underwent certain renovations after the French Revolution, it had remained largely untouched through the ensuing decades, before being boldly reshaped by Haussmann’s renovation plans. Acquired by the city circa 1860, a portion of the land was sold off for the development of lavish town houses, and the remaining space reworked into a dynamic, intriguing garden. New lawns were laid, sweeping promenades and picturesque pathways established, the existing grottoes updated and embellished, and a variety of tropical plants added to the flowering beds, from tree ferns and banana plants, to yucas, agaves and caladiums.
A keen gardener, Monet would no doubt have been intrigued by these changes, and the wealth of unusual plant specimens on view. He had first been drawn to this urban oasis in 1876, most likely through the encouragement of his patron Ernest Hoschedé, where he executed a concentrated series of three canvases (Wildenstein, nos. 398, 399 and 400), the newly finished elegant townhouses along the periphery glimpsed through the foliage. Returning two years later, the artist undertook another trio of paintings devoted to the Parc Monceau, this time drawing the viewer further into the heart of the garden, immersing them in its quiet, secluded atmosphere. In 1878, Monet was living just a short walk away on the Rue d’Edimbourg in the Quartier de l’Europe, with his young family. The artist had settled there in January of that year, and would have been able to closely observe the beautifully maintained park as it entered its springtime bloom and progressed into its full summer growth.
Intriguingly, in the present Le Parc Monceau, Monet does not focus on the large-leafed, exotic plants that had been recently introduced to the gardens, instead training his eye on the dense flowering shrubbery, lush grass and full trees that make up the essential fabric of the park, each rendered in subtly variegated shades of green. Situating himself in the midst of the foliage, in what seems to be a painter’s blind, set at a distance from the principal pathways and thoroughfares, Monet is able to observe the play of life within the garden, while he himself remained partially hidden from view. The artist often favoured compositional devices that allowed him to view distant objects through a screen or a frame. Here, the silhouettes of a group of fashionable figures are just glimpsed through the bushes and trees in the middle ground, the tones of their elegant, modish outfits standing-out among the verdure.
Unlike his paintings of the Tuileries Gardens (Wildenstein, nos. 401-404) – which presented an expansive aerial view of the strictly formal gardens, seen from the balcony of Victor Chocquet’s fourth floor apartment – Monet’s visions of the Parc Monceau fully immerse the viewer in the vibrant vitality of the park, allowing the vegetation to envelope them. While the majority of this concentrated series showcase the social side of the garden, depicting it as a site for recreation and promenading, with an array of well-to-do figures circulating along the pathways or resting on a park bench in the shade, the present view eschews such details, and instead revels in the verdant beauty and fecundity of nature. Using flickering, quick brushwork to describe the texture of the foliage and the dappled play of light, Monet imbues the composition with a vivid sense of spontaneity and energy, forms coalescing and dissipating as the eye moves through the scene, mimicking the sensation of being in the garden and absorbing the richness of the setting.
Shortly after its completion, the present Le Parc Monceau was acquired directly from Monet by one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of Impressionism – Georges de Bellio, a Romanian-born physician with a considerable family fortune behind him. An innately curious figure with an abiding passion for art, De Bellio appears to have first come across the Impressionists in late 1873 or early 1874, just prior to the opening of the inaugural Impressionist exhibition that spring. Through the ensuing years, he cultivated close friendships with many of the leading figures of the movement, regularly providing essential financial support to different members of the group. As Renoir recalled, ‘Every time one of us had a pressing need for 200 francs, he ran to the Café Riche at the lunch hour. There one was sure to find Mr. De Bellio, who would buy, without even looking at it, the painting one brought him’ (quoted in A. Vollard, Renoir, 1919, p. 71).
De Bellio acquired his first Monet painting at auction in January 1874, marking the beginning of a decades-long journey that would see him develop an extraordinary collection of contemporary avant-garde art. On the walls of his apartment, works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, and Morisot were hung side by side with important canvases by Sisley, Pissarro, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Monet was among the best represented painters in the collection, with almost sixty works by the artist recorded in De Bellio’s possession at one time or another, including his famed early masterpiece, Impression, soleil levant (Wildenstein, no. 263; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris). An abundance of letters and correspondence between Monet and De Bellio also reveal their close and enduring friendship, which provided the artist with an important source of solace and support during some of the most difficult years of his personal life.
In 1876, De Bellio had chosen another of Monet’s paintings of the Parc Monceau directly from the artist’s studio (Wildenstein, no. 398; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Considered in this light, the present view of the gardens may have been painted by Monet to complement the earlier canvas in his friend’s collection. De Bellio most likely loaned the present Le Parc Monceau to the Fourth Impressionist exhibition, which opened on 10 April 1879 at 28, avenue de l’Opéra, Paris. The event included twenty-nine paintings by Monet in a mini-retrospective of his career thus far, with works dating from 1867 right up to his most recently finished canvases. Among the group were a selection of the artist’s views of the newly renovated Paris, together showcasing the inherent modernity of Monet’s vision.