150 years ago, Claude Monet had no idea that his painting would become the manifesto of a new artistic movement. The adventures and misadventures of an iconic painting!
Take a good look at this masterpiece. It’s the very first Impressionist painting! In November 1872, while in Le Havre, Monet opened the window of the Hôtel l’Amirauté on the Grand Quai and painted the awakening of the port in the early hours of the morning. This work would mark a turning point in the history of art.
It’s all about the atmosphere…
Although he chose a subject that was modern for his time – the port and its industrial activity – Monet was particularly interested in the light, the reflections on the surface of the water and the vaporous envelope around the sun. He juxtaposed colours and sketched in touches of blue and orange that gave the painting an unfinished, slightly blurred appearance, far removed from the academic painting of the time. Monet was freezing his fleeting sensations on canvas.
The irony of it all!
In 1874, Monet exhibited his work in Paris, at the very first exhibition of the Société Anonyme Coopérative, together with artist friends such as Eugène Boudin, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot, who had no place in the official salons. The reactions were scathing. The art critic Louis Leroy wrote: ‘Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape’, before adding ironically: ‘Since I’m impressed, there must be some impression in there!’ And so the canvas gave its name to the Impressionist movement!
From hand to hand
The work, which did not impress the critics of the time, was bought for 800 francs (€3,000) by one of Monet’s friends, the collector Ernest Hoschedé, a great industrialist with a passion for art and a true visionary spirit. In 1878, bankrupt, he sold it to Georges de Bellio, one of the first lovers of Impressionist painting, for the modest sum of 210 francs (€800)! On his death, it was inherited by his daughter Victorine and her husband, Ernest Donop de Monchy. They bequeathed it to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, where it was first exhibited in 1946. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the painting’s reputation really took off.
They stole the Sun!
On 27 October 1985, thieves broke into the Musée Marmottan Monet in broad daylight. They held the public and the guards at gunpoint and stole nine paintings, including Impression, Sunrise. The investigation took five years. The loot was found in a hideout in Porto-Vecchio, Corsica. The crooks tried to negotiate the works with the Japanese mafia!
A vibrant range of colours, from Paris to Le Havre
Monet always returned to the raw material of Impression, Sunrise. Water and light were his fields of exploration; Normandy and the Ile-de-France (Paris Region) fed his creativity. In Honfleur in the 1860s, he joined his fellow landscape painters at the famous Ferme Saint-Siméon and captured the nuances of the Flowered Coast. In Paris, he favoured sites on the River Seine, especially La Grenouillère, which he painted alongside Renoir in 1869. In his boat studio at Vétheuil, he captured the reflections of the river in the late 1870s. Finally, in 1883, he moved to Giverny, where he created gardens bursting with colour and a home studio where you can still feel this unprecedented artistic ferment.
A different way to discover Impressionism
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