Art Up Close and Personal--Monet: The Late Years

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We all grew up with prints of great paintings, right? My parents had huge framed Gaugin and Cezanne prints. I had Renoirs--the Two Girls at the Piano went with me from high school to college. And the prints were pretty, nice to look at, something to hang on the walls.

Then, on my first trip to Paris, I saw the real Renoirs in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and I sat on the bench in the gallery and CRIED. They were so staggeringly alive!!! So REAL! I saw many other great paintings, too, and I learned that there was no comparison between the print and the original work.

Fast forward to this week, museum outing #2, with my painter sister-in-law who is visiting.  An exhibition called MONET: THE LATE YEARS is on at the fabulous Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, and we made a day of it. 

 
 It was amazing. It was curated by the Kimbell, and only traveled to one other city, San Francisco. There are over fifty paintings from the last decade of Monet's life. He had suffered great personal loss in 1914, the deaths of his wife and his eldest son. He was also losing his eyesight to cataracts.

After a fallow period spent grieving, he painted feverishly until the end of his life in 1926, confining his subjects to his house and garden at Giverny. His style changed dramatically. Here is early Monet from the Impressionist period, all soft and dreamy, the palette muted.

Here are some of the later paintings from the exhibition.

Look at the energy and passion, the bold brushstrokes and heavy paint in some of these last paintings.

And here are my sister-in-law Dorothy and me with our friend Claude in his garden at Giverny.

Of course I bought the exhibition book--it was a once in a lifetime memento, and fascinating reading. I'm going to be thinking about these paintings for a long time.

Reds and readers, what was the first fine art you ever saw in person, and how did it affect you?