Monet's restless quest for new and intriguing landscapes took him virtually to every corner of France. The 1880s, when the three paintings here were done, was a particularly active period, as the artist traveled from place to place in search of the perfect landscape. In 1889 he journeyed with friends to the Creuse River valley in central France. Among the spots he visited there was Les Piles, the site where the two tributaries of the Creuse join to form the main river. This is the site depicted in the painting above, Ravine of the Creuse. Monet couldn't have picked a more rustic or remote location. Les Piles was miles from civilization, a genuine wilderness of rock-ribbed cliffs and rushing water, utterly unspoiled. Monet loved it. He loved the isolation, the wildness and rough energy of the landscape, what he called its "terrible savagery." For two months he worked to express the landscape's rugged power through a single dramatic motif: the massive, jagged cliff, visible on the left in the painting, that plunges into the Creuse at the very point where the streams of the river merge and turn the water white with rapids. Again and again he painted the spot -- in full sun and in moonlight, at dusk and dawn -- struggling to capture what he called the "instantaneity" of nature's color and atmosphere, moving from canvas to canvas as the light and weather changed. What resulted was Monet's first genuine series of paintings, his earliest attempt to portray, in a suite of canvases all dedicated to the same theme, the totality of optical experience.
As an ongoing record of the artist's perceptions unfolding over time, the Creuse series was, by definition, open-ended. It was far more about the process of creation than completion. The project was intensely frustrating for Monet, who struggled to achieve what he knew he could never fully achieve -- a genuinely finished portrait of nature. There was, quite simply, no finish to it. The same urge led him, fearlessly, to paint water, the most fugitive of mediums, the element in most constant flux -- always becoming -- never at rest. In fact, images of water appear throughout Monet's art, from his earliest views of the Normandy coast to the Waterlilies at the end of his life. He once said of the sea, "I should like to be always near it or on it, and when I die, to be buried in a buoy." He never shrank from the challenge of painting it. Water is also a principal theme in the Ravine of the Creuse, where the river, sparkling in brilliant spring sunlight, chatters over the rocks and out into the foreground. The fluidity of water, of light and color and atmosphere, and of the face of nature itself -- these were Monet's principal themes. His life-long struggle to depict these things, his heroic attempt to give form to the formless, would forever change the art of painting.
Like the Impressionist painters, the Impressionist composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel were revolutionaries, reacting against German romanticism with its massive formal structures and heavy harmonies. They were seeking a French ideal of clarity and elegance that would contrast dramatically with Wagnerian length and heaviness. Erik Satie, an earlier proponent of a unique French style, encouraged the Impressionist composers to create "a music of our own -- if possible, without any sauerkraut. We could use the means that Monet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others have made known. We could transpose those means to music. Nothing simpler." The music that resulted created a fresh musical language that utilized radical new ideas regarding tonality, harmony, formal structure, melody, timbre, rhythm, and meter.
As it was for the Impressionist painters, water was a popular subject for this new music. Ravel's Jeux d'eau stands as just one of the many musical depictions of water. Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau, Jardin sous la pluie,and La Mer are others. Jeux d'eau takes its spirit from the imagery of the symbolist poet Henri de Regnier, whose words are quoted just under the title in Ravel's score. "A river God laughs at the water that tickles him." Ravel renders his image of constantly flowing water in such a way that the hard edges of classical formal structure are worn away. They are replaced with more evanescent boundaries where musical ideas merge effortlessly. The didactic tonal centers of earlier composers now become more ephemeral with the use of seventh and ninth chords that replace traditional tonic triads. In order to capture the totality of his experience on the Creuse River, Monet was forced to paint a series of paintings. Because Ravel's art occupies the dimension of time, this composition can take the listener through a panorama of musical moods, from the tranquil opening, to the dramatic, almost savage climax, and finally to the peaceful repetitions in the final measures -- inconclusive, ephemeral, like water itself. Monet's shimmering colors find a match here in Ravel's scintillating pianism.
In April of 1883 Monet moved to the small farming village of Giverny which was situated on the Seine about 50 miles northwest of Paris. He'd long been looking for a real home, a place where he could at last center himself, his companion Alice Hoschede, and their eight children. He found it in the placid countryside of Giverny. The village quickly became a kind of refuge for him, a beloved sanctuary for himself and his family, and in the years that followed he drew inspiration increasingly from the landscape in and around Giverny, painting the poplars and the haystacks and the fields near his home. In a sense, he was mapping his own backyard, laying claim to the private landscape that he was coming more and more to love. One of the most majestic of these paintings is the work depicting a Meadow at Giverny in Autumn. Monet painted it toward the end of the 1880s. The picture captures perfectly the hazy, sun-lit atmosphere of fall. The line of poplars just visible at the right edge cast long, chromatically rich shadows across the billowing meadow grass, which is itself alive with color. The painting's elevated horizon line, the rhythmic interplay of sun and shadow, and the unusually broad brush technique all work to draw the eye to the surface of the canvas, diminishing the sense of three dimensional space. What results is a shimmering veil of color that anticipates Monet's paintings of Waterlilies at the end of his career.
Unlike the Creuse River scene, which exults in nature's wildness, the mood here is gentle and contemplative. Nature is portrayed in the fullness of autumn, for the moment, complete and at rest. Also unlike the Creuse scene, where Monet was very much an outsider, a tourist painting a landscape he knew he would soon have to leave, the Meadow at Giverny radiates a powerful feeling of home. It is an intensely personal image of Monet's own growing sense of domestic contentment, a charmed place with the artist himself at the very center.
Claude Debussy wrote twenty-four Preludes for piano, dividing them into two books of twelve each. They are modeled on earlier sets of Preludes by J. S. Bach and Frederic Chopin, but instead of exploring the expressive possibilities of twelve different tonalities as did Bach and Chopin, Debussy creates a variety of musical impressions. Debussy assigned descriptive titles to each Prelude, but placed it at the end of the piece, suggesting that he meant for the music to be heard first as pure music rather than as musical description. The titles refer to works of art, poetry, nature, or legend. "Bruyeres" (Heaths), the fifth work in Book 2, begins with a simple monophonic melody that mirrors the gently curving lines of the tree shadows in Monet's painting. A brief and whimsical foray into contrasting material eventually leads back to the opening melody -- a welcome return. Debussy's music paints a picture of peaceful serenity that gently evokes the solidity of the places we call home.
One of Monet's favorite locales was the Normandy coast in northwestern France. Already in 1857, at the age of sixteen, he was at work in Normandy, painting in the open air alongside his teacher, the landscapist Boudin. In the decades that followed, he returned repeatedly to the region in search of fresh landscape views. Monet's 1882 visit, when he painted the splendid Fisherman's Cottage, brought him first to the port city of Dieppe. Monet quickly found the city too noisy and congested, and decided to travel farther down the coast, looking for a quieter spot to work. He discovered it in the fishing village of Pourville, about two miles south of Dieppe. Monet was charmed by Pourville's rustic setting, and particularly by the dramatic expanse of cliffs that swept south along the Channel coast past the even tinier village of Varengeville. He settled in the area in February of 1882 and began a painting campaign that lasted well into the summer. Among the landscape sites that attracted him most was a ravine that cut the cliffs near Varengeville and was crowned on its southern slope with a fisherman's hut -- the hut depicted in the painting above. Half concealed behind a screen of foliage at the very edge of the sea, the hut rides atop the cliff like the sailboats bobbing on the waves out in the Channel. The painting's brilliant summer light, its rainbow palette and exuberant brush technique transform a rocky outcropping into an earthly paradise of sun, wind and sea. The image of paradise on earth, of a remote, poetic realm of enchantment, had been part of French painting since the middle ages, and it reached its fullest expression in the 18th century, in the rococo arcadias of Watteau and Fragonard. Though Monet was certainly aware of these earlier, idealized visions of paradise, he was too much a realist to borrow from them. Like his Impressionists colleagues Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, Monet from the beginning was committed to painting the "modern landscape," the actual fields, rivers and coastline of late 19th century France. Even his arcadia here is approachable, habitable, a humble stretch of sand and rock, of wild flowers and nettle grass. An actual place. It is this promise of paradise in our very midst, the promise of contentment, peace and even joy, that makes this painting one of my favorites from the whole of the 19th century. If I were going to risk entering any picture and take my chances with the world portrayed beyond its frame, it would be this one.
Debussy's L'Isle joyeuse was probably inspired by the Watteau painting Embarkation for the Island of Cythera. Cythera is both a real place as well as an imaginary one. A Greek island just south of the Peloponnesus, it is also the mythological place where Venus was born from the sea. In naming this piece, Debussy eschews the specific name of the island, opting instead for a more universal "island of joy." Unlike the atmospheric quality of the previous two compositions, this piece is a ballad, telling the story of a journey to an ideal place of love and beauty. The opening trills suggest the excited anticipation of the travelers; a middle section depicts them floating over the water; their arrival is heralded by jubilant trumpeting; and their ecstatic joy in realizing their destination provides a climactic finish. Monet's and Debussy's artful renditions of these idyllic places provide models from which we can each shape our own paradise--our own fisherman's cottage -- our own islands of joy.