Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 –1926) is one of my favorite painters. As part
of the celebrations of Le French May this year, an exhibition of 17 of
his paintings was held at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum this year. It
will be last day tomorrow. So off I went to Shatin today.
First we had a short documentary on his life. Within 2.5 minutes, we had a brief introduction of his life and times: he came from a Parisian family of grocers but preferred a simple and modest life. He is a tough and uncompromising man, a good father, a considerate husband and faithful friend of the author Octave Mirbeau, the politician George Clémenceau and the artist Auguste Renoir and the founder of the so-called Impressionist style of painting starting in the 1870's.
This is Étretat, the famous cliff in Normandy where he painted one of his famous paintings. There are three recurrent elements in his paintings: earth, water, sky and through all three the effect of light. He grew up in Normandy and in 1890, bought a house in Giverny where he remained until he died in 1926. "Everyday, I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating to me. I want to paint them all", he wrote to Fréderic Bazille, a fellow painter in 1874 .
