Title: Soleil levant
Artist: Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
Medium: pastel on paper
Dimensions: 25.8 x 35 cm
Description
Monet’s pastels are independent, complete works, not preparatory studies. They extend his pictorial repertoire. While he traveled widely, Monet the pastellist focused on a more personal locale: a small corner of Normandy within a fifty-mile radius of the Seine estuary, where he grew up and repeatedly returned throughout his life.
Soleil levant reveals a richly worked surface with layered color. Beneath blues and peach, bursts of bright pink pierce the clouds, demonstrating the artist’s nuanced color sense. Monet often favored laid paper with distinctive “chain” marks that caught pigments, highlighting each layer’s texture and hue. This work likely belongs to a group of a dozen pastels executed between 1865 and 1870. Like them, it features a low horizon, granting a wider expanse to explore the color gradations of a rapidly changing sky. While the series’ precise place within his oeuvre is discussed, scholars suggest it may represent Monet’s first sustained exploration of serial imagery, predating his celebrated Giverny series by at least a decade. For Monet, pastel was not separate from paint but at times ahead of his thinking on canvas.
The first recorded owner was French actor and theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, a vocal supporter of the Nabis. He later co-founded the Théâtre L’Œuvre, a laboratory for Symbolist theatre. The pastel was later gifted to a friend and subsequently inherited by the present owner’s grandmother.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 3200 x 2301 pixels
Image Size: 410 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
