Monet Vs. Degas: Impressionist Aesthetics Essay

Each of the artist has pale and light colors. Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his different paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. Degas if famous for the “After bath, women drying herself.” This painting was made from 1889-1890. This painting was on a pastel paper.

The painting Impression: Sunrise, or Impression: Soleil Levant, was what brought Monet his greatest success. “It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan-Moret, Paris” (Biography 2). Even though this was not his first or best painting it is the one that has left the most mark, for it was the initial spark for Impressionism. It was this success that earned him and other fellow artists the title of the “Impressionists.” Monet began to earn great amounts of money and was able to move out to his dream home in Giverny.

Monet spent a great deal of his youth in Normandy, growing up in a suburb of Le Havre, where this view was painted. Even though this painting was completed very early in his career, Monet must have thought greatly of this piece, as he showed it in an exhibition held in Paris in 1876.

Claude was born in Paris, France in the year 1840. Despite the fact that Paris was his birthplace, Claude only spent 5 years of his childhood there as he and his family moved to Le Havre, a port town in Normandy. Claude developed a love for art in his early childhood and was well known in his town for drawing caricatures of his community members. His mother was highly encouraged his talent whereas Claude’s father wanted his son to become a businessman. Living in Le Havre, Claude had many opportunities to strengthen his talent such as meeting Eugene Boudin who was a local landscape artist and introduced Claude to landscape painting outdoors and set him on the track to his future success. In 1859 Claude moved back to Paris to pursue his career in art. During his time in Paris he was enrolled in the Academie Suisse and was influenced by the paintings of Barbizon School. Other great influences on his art were his friends Charles Gleyre, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille as well as Johann Barthold Jongkind who was a well-known landscape painter of the

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born October 25, 1881 in the city of Málaga, Spain on the Mediterranean Sea. His parents, José Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso, were both from Spain. His father from northern Spain and his mother from Picasso’s birthplace. It was not unusual for people to take both parents family names. At the time of Picasso’s birth, his was was an art teacher in Málaga, which obviously greatly influenced Picasso. It was when the family moved to Barcelona when Picasso was 15 years old and his father took a job as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts that really blossomed his interest in painting. He was an exceptional artist at a very young age, as displayed in A Man In a Cap, 1895 (Picasso, Pg. 14). He painted this painting when he was only 14 years old, and it depicts a beggar on the street. I particularly like this because he painted something that caught his eye as a young boy.

Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840 and would become known as one of France’s famous painters. Monet is often attributed with being the leading figure of the style of impressionism; but this was not always the case. Monet started out his career as a caricaturist, showing great skill. Eventually “Monet began to accompany [Eugène] Boudin as the older artist . . . worked outdoors, . . . this “truthful” painting, Monet later claimed, had determined his path as an artist.” Monet’s goal took off as his popularity grew in the mid 1870s after he switched from figure painting to the landscape impressionist style. William Seitz supports this statement through his quote, “The landscapes Monet painted at Argenteuil between 1872 and 1877 are

Pierre Bonnard was born on October 3rd, 1867 at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a village outside Paris. He was the son of prominent official of the French Ministry of War. Due to his insitnace Bonnard studied law at Sorbonne from 1885 to 1888. During the year of 1887 Bonnard enrolled in evening classes at Académie Julian, which was an art school in Paris. While at the art school he and four of his friends joined together and formed group which was known as Les Nabis. They used this group to integrate art into daily life; they did this by combining nature with personal aesthetic and symbolism. They used posters, prints, book illustrations and paintings to show this. In 1981 Bonnard won his first competition which was making a poster for French champagne, also in 1891 Bonnard showed his work at an annual exhibit at the Society of Independent Artists. This is where he started to make his mark in the artist community. He didn’t become an established and successful artist until 1896; this is when he had his first solo art show.

He was inspired and influenced by Vincent van Gogh Paul Gauguin, and many more. He influenced Georges Braque, Joan Miró, and even more.

Monet lived a long life, when his art start being sold in his later life, he bought a land which had an artificial pond, hence his paintings, “Water Lilies” which is actually a series of 250 paintings. Unlike Manet, Monet hasn’t painted a landscape. Monet hasn’t used any light so no source of light can be seen. Monet hasn’t focused on one single form in his painting instead, throughout the painting, each object or form has its own detail. I think that the image looks rather unrealistic; however it seems that Monet was actually painting what he felt because when one looks at the painting, it seems like an image from a dream rather than real life. Monet has called this series, “my most beautiful work of

In Edgar Degas’s life females were featured in more than 1/3 of his art works. Did Degas treat his female subjects in his works of art, including a pastel on paper and paintings differently because of their status in society? The paintings, pastel on paper; which will be mainly used to compare this, will be The Portrait of a family (The Bellelli Family), Woman Bathing (from 1884) and Portrait of Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Cards. These works of art; and the series they belonged to have many similarities, but they also have their differences too.

But the artists who would become known as the Impressionists (including Claude Monet, Mary 5,Camille Pissarro) looked at art a little differently—they wanted to make art as truly

By the time he was seventeen, Monet was already making money from his work and had won a local reputation as a caricaturist. Skillful and amusing, his caricatures were displayed in the window of a local frame maker, Monsieur Gravier, where they drew crowds of appreciative viewers. Gravier also displayed paintings by the landscape painter Eugene Boudin, who was an old friend of his. Monet's development of friendship and informal tutelage of Boudin proved to be formative for Monet's future direction as a landscape painter. (Gordon, 38)

Beyond the simple fact that one (post-impressionism) cannot have existed without the other (impressionism) the revolutionary technique shared by both movements; small, generally circular or curved strokes, brilliant colors, use of light, and subject matter that reached beyond the traditional scope ties them together in a unique and easily identifiable manner. One cannot view Monet’s Impressions: soleil levant and Van Gogh’s Starry Night without instantly seeing the undeniable similarities; both artists’ use of light and deliberate brush strokes leave the viewer with little doubt about the artistic movements from which they came.

According to the Steins, Matisse and Picasso are two gifted men whose temperaments and strengths were more different. It was only natural that the two artists would see themselves as rivals.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus defines beauty and the artist's comprehension of his/her own art. Stephen uses his esthetic theory with theories borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas and Plato. The discourse can be broken down into three main sections: 1) A definitions of beauty and art. 2) The apprehension and qualifications of beauty. 3) The artist's view of his/her own work. I will explain how the first two sections of his esthetic theory relate to Stephen. Furthermore, I will argue that in the last section, Joyce is speaking of Stephen Dedalus and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as his art.