Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a French artist and a founder of French Impressionist painting. Throughout his career, Claude Monet produced countless oil paintings and pastel artworks.
Claude Monet's work, Twilight, portrays a twilit, countryside scene. The 19th-century artist lived in Giverny, France, from 1883, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project. This scene possibly features the Giverny countryside.
It was the Claude Monet's ambition to document the French countryside; this led him to adopt a method of portraying the same scene multiple times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons.
Twilight employs a wide tonal range, which contrasts heavily shaded trees and fields with the strongly tinted yellow of the breaks in the clouds. The work features a narrow pallet range with a dominance of blue and earthy tones. The medium of pastel is applied thickly, in directional strokes, characteristic of Impressionist art.
Claude Monet's approach is experimentation and amplifies a sense of flow, freedom and expansion often distinctive of his works. There is no action within the composition and overall effect generated by the work is a sense of mellow stillness. The Impressionists endeavoured to create an impression as much as an artwork In Twilight, Claude Monet appears be concerned with to projecting a feeling of a twilit scene which is not limited to a visual experience.
Impressionism was a movement that began in the late 1960s by a group of artists including Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Paul Cezanne and is an important movement in the history of art in the modern period. Impressionism was a separation from the conservative approach to art that dominated the art world throughout the Vanitas tradition.
Claude Monet was a consistent and prolific practitioner of the Impressionism's philosophy of expressing the artist's perceptions before nature, particularly as applied to plein-air landscape painting.
The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of Claude Monet's painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of several independent exhibitions mounted by Claude Monet and fellow artists as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Monet followers should also take a look at Olympia by Manet, Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir, Bellelli Family by Degas and Starry Night by Van Gogh.
Impressionist artists believed that art should represent specifically contemporary sensibility. The movement and its artists, such as Claude Monet, became very influential and developed into a division within the wider world of European culture.
Claude Monet's artworks have achieved worldwide renown. In 2007, an exhibition was displayed at the Royal Academy in London, exploring the 19th-century artist's work before he became famous.
The exhibition, titled, The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings, featured over 80 of Claude Monet's works, and included pastels, drawings and caricatures. One of these works was Twilight. The objective of the exhibition was to explore the genesis of Claude Monet's work and reveal the his talent as a draughtsman.
