#impressionism

This was one of the first of his rehearsal-room pictures, painted when he'd started getting himself in behind the scenes at the Paris opera house through friends with subscriptions. The building he was working in burned down a few years later, from what I can find, so the room itself is long gone.

From what I've read, he spent his last summers teaching and painting around a fishing harbor in Massachusetts, and the pictures from those years got looser and looser — apparently people argued even then about whether some were done. He died not long after this one.

The bridge is a real one, flung over the railway yards at a busy Paris station back when half the city was being torn up and rebuilt in iron and stone — from what I've read, that new metal city was the fashionable thing to paint at the time. He also had family money, and spent a good chunk of it buying up his friends' paintings; when he left the lot to the state there was apparently a long row about whether they'd even take it.

He only went to Venice the once, fairly late on, and apparently didn't finish much of it there — the canvases came home with him and got worked over in the studio for years after. There's more than one version of this same view.

A whole movement got its name from a review mocking this one — the critic used the word as an insult, supposedly, and it stuck. It hung in a show the painters put on themselves after the official one kept turning them down.

A ropewalk is just a very long straight lane — apparently the rope has to be stretched out full length before it can be twisted, so the workshop ends up being the length of the rope. He spent summers over in Holland for years, painting the same small trades again and again.

Monet reportedly dug a trench in the garden so he could lower a huge canvas down and keep painting the top half without moving it — his soon-to-be wife modeled for all four women, apparently.

According to what I found, he only managed to paint full-time after winning something like 100,000 francs in a state lottery — before that it was a government day job on the side. He kept coming back to this same river valley for years, apparently, enough that people credit him with putting it on the map.

They say this started as a quick study of a French stage actress, a favourite subject who sat for several portraits like this one.

From what I read, he did a whole series like this — women in white, blazing sun, water behind — and collectors couldn't get enough of them at the time.

Apparently he painted a whole string of these — a woman, a window, light coming through — enough of them that people talk about it as a series. It's named after the china rather than the person, which tells you something about where he was looking.

It's pastel — chalk, basically — rather than paint, which I only found out looking it up, and it explains why the colour sits so grainy. He drew dancers for decades, apparently, mostly the standing-about parts rather than anything you'd buy a ticket for.

He was sick to death of painting rich people's portraits by then, and spent his holidays doing pictures like this instead — no commission, no sitter, just whatever patch of ground happened to be in front of him.

He worked on a whole stack of these canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, then finished them off back home in France rather than on the spot — which sounds like cheating until you consider how fast the weather moves. He's supposed to have said London wouldn't be worth painting without the fog.

He only went to Venice once, apparently, and finished most of the paintings from that trip back home afterwards, working from memory.

One of three dance scenes a dealer commissioned in one go, so they're usually talked about as a set rather than on their own. The woman modelling is said to be Suzanne Valadon, who was posing for painters at the time and went on to become a serious painter herself — which nobody seems to have expected.

He was known to be an anarchist, and painting people who worked with their hands was part of the politics — not just a pretty subject but a point being made.

One of the late garden pictures, painted when his eyesight was going badly — cataracts, which he put off having operated on for years. Canvases like this sat around unwanted for decades afterwards, and it's said they only got taken seriously once abstract painting had come along and given people a way to like them.

They say he worked on a whole stack of canvases at once from a hospital terrace across the river, swapping to a fresh one every time the light shifted, then spent years finishing the lot back home in France. The fog wasn't getting in the way of what he came for — from what I've read it was the reason he came.

This stretch of the Seine just outside Paris was where he lived for years — a town people came out to from the city by train to mess about in boats. He painted that same water over and over, and had a boat rigged up as a floating studio to do it from, apparently.