The Lighthouse at Honfleur
CLAUDE MONET
CLAUDE MONET, 1864. OIL ON CANVAS.
Monet and his friend, the artist Frédéric Bazille, spent the summer of 1864 on the Northern French coast at the summer house of Monet’s parents. There, they kept gentle hours and spent the days painting en plein air, depicting the area around Honfleur from dozens of different viewpoints. The works are typically Impressionist in the style, short thick brushstrokes that capture a feeling of summertime, but they are perhaps more exacting in their detail than later works by Monet where a looseness on display here became more dominant. Monet was a young man, still finding the essence of the style he would come to represent, and Bazille was his closest friend in these years. Together, the two artists traveled France in search of motifs, and they found it in Honfleur. The varied landscape provided ample opportunity to experiment and refine, and by the end of the summer Monet had broken through into a new maturity of style that would rise as he became the most significant painter of his generation.