Claude Monet Essay

The painting selected for this assignment is a piece by Claude Monet, titled The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam. This artwork was painted in 1874, with oil on canvas, and the dimensions are 21 ¼ x 25 ½ in. (54 x 64.1 cm). The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam is housed at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. The form of this painting is representational, and realistic. The content of the painting depicts a windmill on a canal in a quaint and charming town in Amsterdam. Windmills are an important part of the Netherlands, and they add history and charm to this picturesque country. Monet was a French impressionist artist and he liked to capture the emotions created by a scene. Impressionists also like to capture

He liked to capture the natural light at different times of the day. Monet used perceptual colors instead of the actual colors. He would not paint an object the color of the actual object, but he would paint the object the way the color appeared in the natural light. He would paint over and through a painted wet surface with wet pigment, or “wet on wet” and he painted with very intense colors. In The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam, Monet used the paint medium of oil paint on canvas. By using oil paint he was able to render the most subtle changes in light. Monet would paint in quick and small strokes of color to show the effects of the light. In this painting we can see the results of the short and quick strokes if we look closely as the painting. He liked to mix his colors on the canvas and would combine two or more pigments on a brush and would blend them as he brushed them onto the canvas. This technique created a continuous scale of tones and hues. Monet also liked to use the darker shades of a color, as seen in the blue house or on the dark orange roof which effect is due to the use of the oil paint. He used a complementary color scheme using the color blue and the color orange which are hues opposite each other on the color wheel. He also used the neutral colors of gray, brown