Norton Simon Museum

On February 5, 2011, Saturday, I went to the Norton Simon museum for the paper. The museum was incredibly packed with students on tours. As I walked in to the 14^th-20^th century section of the museum, two paintings caught my attention right away. The first painting is called “The Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil” by a French artist, Claude Monet (1840-1926). The second painting is called “Farmhouse and Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan” by another French artist, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Interestingly, these two paintings were placed right next to each other, so there was an obvious contrast in colors, as well as in compositions between these two paintings.

“The Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil” by Claude Monet (1840-1926) was an oil painting on canvas. This magnificent painting was completed after the artist was recovering from a series of terrible things that had happened to his personal life. The painting was extremely realistic. It caught my attention right away. When I was looking at this painting, I felt like I was actually walking into the garden. The composition was so carefully thought out and placed right in the center of the canvas. The painting, in my opinion was full of enthusiasm. The palette that the artist used for this painting was very colorful and full of life, which was what the painting needed. Broad strokes of blues, violets, creams and whites portrayed the large areas of sky, house and garden path. In addition to that, with the energetic dapples of greens, yellows and reds really helped to define the magnificence of the garden as well as the sunflowers in full bloom. I think the artist Claude Monet did an amazing job with this painting as well as bringing this painting into life.

The second painting is called “Farmhouse and Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan” by a French artist called Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). This incredible piece was done in one year (1884-1885) and it was oil on canvas. The house depicted in this painting was a country estate in the south of France owned by the artist’s father and it plays as an important subject matter for the artist’s paintings in the 1870s and 1880s. In this painting, if you look closely, you can see the underlying pencil sketch is still visible. This piece is more of an impressionism piece. The artist employed quick strokes of paint to portray the foliage of the farmhouse and its garden. This painting was a lot more simplified than the other painting by Monet, because the simple geometric shapes that the artist used in this painting such as the sturdy rectangles of the building or the flattened cylinders of the trunks of the trees. In addition to that, the palette also was not as colorful and enthusiastic as the other painting. The composition of this painting was a bit strange to me as the chestnut trees were the main focus of the painting and the house itself was more far back.

It was a great experience for me to be able to see these two amazing painting up close in person. The contrasts of these two paintings were very obvious as one was more colorful than the other, but they still looked incredible individually. Each has its own uniqueness in the use of colors as well as in composition.