My Impressionism on Monet: A Study in Light

by Cyn Rene' Whitfield
One day in the fall of 1890, while walking on the slopes above his house, Monet is attracted by a haystack that glows almost white, like a luminous spot, in the bright sun. But by the time he returns with materials and begins to paint, the effect has already changed. This was the beginning of a series by the French born painter, Claude Monet. The selective attention was to capture an ordinary subject matter, haystacks, so the viewer would focus on the non-subject matter of light, composition and technical mastery. In this paper I would like to examine how Monet, in his multiple studies, captured the range of electromagnetic radiation through oil on canvas in his many variations entitled “The Haystacks”.

Monet understood color hue, saturation and amplitude of light long before the field of psychophysics. In each painting, the color of the haystack is different because the light shining on the haystack is different. The color of the haystack is determined by the colors the haystack absorbs. The color we see is simply the colorized light that is not absorbed and that is reflected into our eyes. But Monet had no scientific explanation for what he saw to capture. His paintings were not about the haystacks, but rather an investigation of how the light during different times of the day, or different seasons of the year, changed the way those haystacks looked. Thus, Monet’s series of haystacks are painted under different light conditions at different times of the day. He would rise before dawn, paint the first canvas for half an hour, by which time the light would have changed. Then he would switch to the second canvas, and so on. The next day he would repeat the process.

Monet is considered to be one of the most representative Impressionists in history. Did he have a higher awareness of absolute threshold? Did he get his awareness from more sensitivity to stimulus and just-noticeable difference (JND)? Was the anatomy of his eyes superior to other artists or was he just gifted in observation? One could argue the validity of Monet possessing superior rods and cones in his eyes to create thirty different representations of light on haystacks but I personally think he is the original founder of the trichromatic theory of color vision. He just didn’t have the attention within him to do so.

References

Kosslyn, S. M., & Rosenberg, R. S. (2007). Fundamentals of Psychology in Context (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Morris, Catherine (1999) The Essential Claude Monet New York: Wonderland Press

Stuckey, Charles F. (1986) Monet A Retrospective New York: Parklane

Sproocati, Sandro (1992) Monet Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, S.p.A.

Livingstone, Margaret S. Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing Monet’s Colors (2002) Retrieved December 16, 2009 from http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/dh.html