Revealed, Monet's first impressions

Rachel Campbell Johnston, Visual Art Critic

Monet was a master with the paintbrush. That much is well known. But what we now learn, from previously unseen drawings and pastels published in The Times today before their first public exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, is that he was also a master at self-promotion.
Where contemporaries such as Degas or Cézanne were well known for their works on paper, Monet, when speaking about his own art, would focus on painting directly onto canvas, on the immediacy of the relationship between nature and his pigment.
He wanted to impress upon the public that he was the ultimate Impressionist: that he was a man who simply went out into the fields with his palette to capture the world around him in shimmering patches of colour to which even the untutored could easily relate.
“People discuss my art and pretend to understand it as if it were necessary to understand, he famously said, “but it is simply necessary to love.”

Monet wanted to distance himself from all the traditions and conventions that drawing implied. But now we are presented with these pastels and drawings and preparatory sketches as well as catalogue extracts from the text from an unpublished manuscript that, written by a friend of the Monet family, remembers a teenager who was dedicated to his drawing. Monet was a sharp caricaturist in his youth. Clearly this interest in draughtsmanship was never extinguished. He mastered the pastel medium and included seven pastel images in the first Impressionist exhibition. And drawing, it appears, went on to play a surprisingly significant role in his later career.
This discovery opens up a new perspective on his art. In his images of London, for instance, or his later water lily paintings, the brushstrokes seem to take on an almost graphic quality.
Monet may not have wanted people to know that he drew because he wanted his work to seem fresh and different. He didn’t want the idea that they had some linear source. In the interests of self-promotion he presented himself almost as an antidraughtsman — even though, when he had to, he used drawing to advertise his art. In an era before quality colour reproductions, Monet, like many other artists, would draw black and white copies for publication, boiling his colourful masterpieces down to line.
In an era when his images have become all too familiar, the knowledge that he drew can help us once again to see his works afresh.