Claude Monet’s Bennecourt is an impressive, square format composition from 1887, in which the artist captures a fleeting view of the village of Bennecourt through a screen of foliage. Composed of slender tree trunks that provide a vertical momentum that in turn overlays horizontal bands of forest floor, village and sky, the present work is a symphonic expression of greens and yellows, rich purples, reds and blues, painted with all of Monet’s characteristic complex energy. Presaging revolutionary developments in painting both within Monet’s own generation and those to come, Bennecourt is the epit.mes of the artist’s best work en plein air.
In 1883, Monet moved to Giverny where he rented a property called Le Presoir. Located about twenty kilometers from his previous home in Vétheuil, this site would become his permanent home, its grounds later proving to be one of the artist’s greatest inspirations and among the most iconic subjects in art history. Before his gardens at Giverny would fully captivate the artist’s attention at the turn of the century, the idyllic expanses along the Seine and Epte rivers, from the flowing waters themselves to the fields and villages along their banks, served as the centerpiece of his canvases. The present work and its pendant (W.1125, see fig. 1) feature the same view, the paintings distinguished from one another primarily by a shift in season. In the sister painting the shadows of low winter light cast deeply onto the ground as compared with the inclusion, in the present work, of several felled tree limbs and blossoming vegetation on the forest floor, signaling the return of spring.
Painted in 1887, the present work was executed during a period of respite from extensive traveling. The previous year Monet undertook painting campaigns to Holland and Brittany, but had also finally established a permanent studio at Giverny, which he had rented since 1883. The surrounding fields and meadows of the district became the focus of much of his output while at home. The idyllic rural compositions Monet executed in the Eure offer a vision of pastoral contentment; the fecundity of France and its vibrant seasons are benevolently portrayed in the Impressionist style. However, they also present a contrast to the more spectacular and unusual sights that Monet strove to paint further abroad. Paul Hayes Tucker has speculated that by traveling throughout France in the 1880s Monet was attempting to decentralize Impressionism which for the most part had been based in Paris. “When queried in 1880 about his defection [from the Impressionists], he asserted, 'I am still an Impressionist and will always remain one.' Unlike some of his former colleagues such as Pissarro who experimented with the pointillist techniques of the Post-Impressionists, Monet staunchly maintained that belief. Indeed, he put it into practice in an unprecedented way, traveling extensively during the decade to paint some of the most spectacular and varied sites in all of France, from the black, ocean-pounded coast of Belle Isle in the Atlantic south of Brittany to the verdant shores of Antibes on the Mediterranean. The places he chose had dramatically different geological formations, weather conditions, lighting effects, and temperature ranges. They also possessed strikingly different moods, mythologies, associations, and appeals” (Exh. Cat., Boston, Museum of Replica Handbags s,, Monet in the '90s. The Series Paintings, 1989-90, pp. 18-19).
Within a few short years, Monet would begin his famed “series” paintings of the 1890s. Ranging from his Londons to his Japanese Bridge, his Rouen Cathedrals to his Haystacks, it would be his poplars that are perhaps closest in concept to the present work (see fig. 2). Indeed, it seems that 1887 was a year in which his Giverny-based production focused a good deal on the imagery of trees as the primary compositional driver (see below). Monet’s experimentation with the tree line—as part of the distant horizon, as the foreground, as a reflected diagonal vantage point—was explored at all t.mes s of day and year.
In Museums—Tree-Top Monet’s Painted in 1887
This kind of intensive focus for the artist was a prime part of his working practice. As Claire Joyes writes, “The landscape at Giverny fascinated him. He spent a long while exploring, walking over hills and through valleys, in marshes and meadows, among streams and poplars. Or, drifting down the quiet river in his boat he would watch with a hunter’s concentration for the precise moment when light shimmered on grass or on silver willow leaves or on the surface of the water. Suddenly or by degrees his motif would be revealed to him” (Claire Joyes, Monet at Giverny, London, 1975, p. 20).
Once settled on a subject Monet would rise early, breakfast lavishly, and set out across the fields with his canvases and painting paraphernalia in a wheelbarrow, often accompanied by an “assistant” in the form of his step-daughter Blanche Hoschedé. Progress was only interrupted by lunch—taken punctiliously at twelve o’clock—or a drastic change in weather. Monet was devoted to painting en plein air and the brilliant acuity of his observations of light and shade drawn directly from nature, was matched only by the sublime harmony of his compositions (see fig. 3). Gustave Geffroy, who became well-acquainted with the artist in the 1880s, wrote about Monet’s working methods: “All haste as he fills the canvas with the dominant tones, he then studies their gradations and contrast and harmonizes them. From this comes the painting’s unity… Observe… all these different states of nature… and you will see the mornings rise before you, afternoons grow radiant, and the darkness of evening descend” (quoted in Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, The Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 2003, p. 234).
Right: Fig. 5 Paul Cézanne, Sous-Bois, 1893-94, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Monet was, of course, not the only painter of his t.mes to explore this theme. A decade or so later Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne each depicted gathered trees in their own distinctive styles (see figs. 4 and 5). In Undergrowth with Two Figures, Van Gogh focuses solely on the forest floor and its blossoming undergrowth while Paul Cézanne uses the verticality of landscape and reaching tree limbs to thrust the viewer skyward in Sous bois. Gustav Klimt would seize on Monet’s square format, as used in Bennecourt and later in his early waterlilies, to paint a golden birch forest and George Braque, in the first thrust of Cubism, would fracture tree and town in green and amber hues (see figs. 6 and 7). Edvard Munch used nature as a stand in for expressions of human emotion, moving inexorably more towards this vein after settling more permanently in his home country of Norway after a nomadic early career (see fig. 8). The great backward thrust of the felled yellow log creating a sense of velocity in a scene without any actual hint of movement, a device that painters today, including David Hockney, incorporate into their work.
Center: Fig. 7 Georges Braque, The Parc at Carrières-Saint-Denis, 1909, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Right: Fig. 8 Edvard Munch, The Yellow Log, 1912, Munch Museet, Oslo © 2024 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The first owner of Bennecourt was the artist John Singer Sargent. An ardent admirer, friend and supporter of Monet, Sargent acquired this painting the year it was created. Monet and Sargent.mes
t at the beginning of the decade and would correspond with each other, visit and paint together at points throughout their life. Both proponents of en plein air painting, Sargent depicted Monet at work a short t.mes
before Bennecourt was created (see fig. 3). One of Sargent’s students, Julie H. Heyneman, would next acquire this work, which would later find its way into the collects
ion of Aline Barnsdall of Beverly Hills, an eccentric heiress who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build her estate Hollyhock House.