Color Theory and Practice

Monet's approach to color evolved dramatically throughout his career. In the 1860s, influenced by Courbet and the Barbizon School, his palette was relatively dark, built around earth tones with selective use of brighter colors. Paintings like "The Woman in the Green Dress" (1866) show skillful but conventional color usage, with local color—the actual color of objects—dominating the composition.

The breakthrough came in the late 1860s and early 1870s as Monet began to understand that color is not inherent in objects but is created by light. This realization led him to abandon black for shadows, instead using deep blues, purples, and greens. He discovered that shadows have color and that they often contain reflections of surrounding hues. The snow scenes from this period, such as "The Magpie" (1868-69), demonstrate this new understanding, with blue shadows creating luminosity impossible with traditional techniques.

By the mid-1870s, Monet had developed his signature broken color technique. Rather than mixing colors on his palette to achieve a desired hue, he placed small touches of pure color side by side, allowing them to mix optically in the viewer's eye. This technique, which would influence Post-Impressionism and Pointillism, created a vibration and luminosity that captured the scintillation of natural light.

His color choices became increasingly bold through the 1880s and 1890s. The Rouen Cathedral series (1892-94) pushed color to extremes, using purples, oranges, and blues to capture different times of day on the same stone facade. These were not the colors anyone would say they "saw" in gray stone, but they conveyed the experience of seeing stone transformed by light.