Claude Monet spent the last forty years of his life painting water lilies, haystacks, and the changing light on the façade of Rouen Cathedral. Before any of that, at twenty-five, he painted a nude.
In 1865 Monet began Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), a canvas more than four metres wide, conceived as an answer to Édouard Manet’s scandalous painting of the same name from 1863. Manet had dropped a naked woman among fully clothed men and let Paris lose its composure. Monet set out to outdo him, and to do it honestly: he began the work in the forest of Fontainebleau, determined to set his scene in real daylight rather than in the studio. His friend Frédéric Bazille and his future wife Camille Doncieux posed for the figures.
The canvas almost did not survive. Short of money, Monet left it with his landlord as security against unpaid rent. When he reclaimed it years later, damp had rotted sections of it, and he cut the damaged parts away. Two fragments remain, both at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris: the central group with the nude, and the left panel.
Then he stopped. After the late 1860s Monet walked away from the nude, and soon from the figure altogether. He had found the subject he wanted.
That subject was light.
Monet is remembered as the painter of light because he abandoned the body. The nude was the first surface he tried to catch light on. His true subject was the sun falling on flesh, on water, on stone, on the same cathedral at different hours. The body was only ever the first thing light happened to.
Every ambitious young painter of his generation had to master the figure. The nude was the entrance examination of French painting, the subject that proved you belonged in the Salon. Monet cleared that hurdle at twenty-five, then spent the rest of his life chasing the harder subject: light that moved while he worked, that changed before the paint dried.
Born in Paris on November 14, 1840, Monet would outlive almost all his contemporaries and watch Impressionism become the most loved painting in the world. The painter the world remembers, the painter of water lilies and poplars and the Rouen façade, began as a painter of the naked body. He began with the figure and ended with light.