Wisteria Claude Monet Postcard

Wisteria by Claude Monet, oil on canvas c. 1925, is a landscape painting of hanging wisteria flower vines over reflections in the water at the famous water lily pond and flower garden that surrounded the artist's home and studio at Giverny. With broad, loosely painted brushstrokes of blue, lavender, purple, bright and deep green, the artist fills the upper half of the picture plane with an impression of the flowering vine, against a background that suggests reflections in water. Light, shadow, colour, atmosphere and reflections merge and blend to dematerialise form in such broad, ephemeral shapes that a type of abstraction emerges, as Monet profoundly influenced much of the abstract art of the 20th century. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder and chief driving force behind the French Impressionist school of painting. Born in Paris, Monet studied with Eugene Boudin, who taught the basics of oil painting and plein-air (open air) easel painting, and later with painter Charles Gleyre, eventually befriending fellow Impressionists Manet, Renoir, Bazille and others. Rejected by the Paris Salon and other venues of the 19th century academic establishment, the Impressionists painted directly from nature, capturing fleeting moments in time in bright, broken colour and small, rapid brushstrokes. Monet lived and studied in London and Holland, producing many paintings, until the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where his painting Impression: Sunrise gained notoriety and earned the group its famous moniker. Following the death of his child and of his first wife Camille, Monet settled in Giverny, where increasing success allowed him to establish a home and studio surrounded by elaborate gardens. Monet painted many landscapes, including garden scenes and his famous Cathedral series, with increasing concerns for light, colour and atmosphere, with a concern for colour and shapes that in his older age bordered on a kind of abstraction, making him one of the most beloved painters of the modern era.