On Monday a few students gathered to resume studying color and how it was used by the Old Masters, specifically Monet. During the lesson, I mentioned Monet never took students, but he come to America to do painting demonstrations at his friend's art school in New York.
However, I wasn't sure where I got this information, so started researching it.
In 1896 Charles Hawthorne became assistant instructor to William Merritt Chase at his Shinnecock, Long Island, outdoor “plein air” painting school where the lessons of the French Impressionists were first brought to American shores. In 1899 Hawthorne opened his own outdoor school in Provincetown, Massachusetts, called the Cape Cod School of Art, and was the first school to teach outdoor figure painting. Upon Hawthorne’s death, Henry Hensche opened The Cape School of Art.
Monet never took students. Although Giverny became an artist colony, Monet kept a private existence and was not eager to socialize with devoted artists who were fascinated by his bright, sunlit canvases and energetic palette.
According to Camille Przwodek whom I had a conversation with during the Olmstead Plein Air Invitational in Atlanta several years ago, Monet did travel to the US and demonstrated his painting style, if I understood her correctly. William Merritt Chase, Charles Hawthorne, and later Henry Hensche learned and taught Monet’s Impressionist style of seeing and painting color with the influence of light.
As it turns out Claude Monet did have several exhibitions of his work in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s, namely the New York Exhibition in 1896, exhibits at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York in 1899, 1900, 1908, and 1924. He had a exhibition of his work in Boston in 1911. So this potentially places the painter in New York and Boston during the last years of the Shinnecock Hills School of Art and the first years of the Cape Cod School of Art. But did he visit their schools? I still have not found this fact documented.
