MANET PAINTS MONET: A Summer In Argenteuil

The cruel Siege of Paris during the winter of 1870-1871, the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression in 1871 saw two of the most prominent painters of modern life remaining in the besieged capital - Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet. In the hour of danger, Manet behaved not like a bohemian or an escapist as did his friend Zola, but instead acted like an ordinary bourgeois patriot and volunteered for the National Guard and painted hardly anything during this time except for a winter landscape showing the village of Montrouge in December 1870, here shown in figure 3 under the effect of snow. Willibald Sauerlander focusses on this auspicious moment in the history of art. In the summer of 1874, Manet and Claude Monet, two outstanding painters of the nascent Impressionist movement, spent their holidays together in Argenteuil, on the Seine River. Their growing friendship is expressed in their artworks culminating in Manet's marvellous portrait of Monet painting complete with easel on a boat. The boat was the ideal site for Monet to execute his new plein air paintings as it enabled him to depict nature, water and the play of light. Similarly Argenteuil was the perfect place for Manet, the great painter of contemporary life, to observe Parisian society at leisure, social conventions and the boredom on vacationers, and his friend's eye for nature. This slim 80 page Getty Research Institute quality publication reproduces 37 plates, many in colour and including contemporary archive photographs such as Monet on the Water Lily bridge at Giverny and spread over two pages of the book his Water Lily Pond of 1900 in glorious blues and pinks and greens. Other notable reproductions are Manet's Velázquez in the Studio, studies of boats and the Iron Track bridge.