We logged onto the website for the Art Institute of Chicago and searched under the 'Collections' tab for Claude Monet.
We could have learned in greater detail about Claude Monet's life and training, but that's for another section--Masters. Instead we just looked at his art and talked a little bit about the style of art that he painted and how his art changed through his life.
We also found out that when Monet was a teen, he liked to draw Caricatures of people--another great idea for a future JSWA.
We looked at a number of his early Caricatures and twenty or so of his paintings. We looked at how, especially as Monet got older, his paintings concentrated on the 'impression' of light, dark, and color--the very definition of the Impressionist style. How his paintings are less about subject matter than they are a recording of light. Monet painted whole series of paintings the same subject painted at different times of the day, and different times of the year, under different weather conditions, etc. We saw how his age and growing blindness had an impact on that perception, and how his painting became more and more about those ethereal effects of light, dark, and atmosphere.
Maren has good vision. I do not. I had her put my glasses on to look at some of the paintings, to show her what the landscape might have looked like to Monet.
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