Flower Beds at Vetheuil by Claude Monet Tea Towel

Flower Beds at Vetheuil by Claude Monet, oil on canvas 1881, is a landscape painting of a large growth of brightly coloured flowers against a background of a lake and hills in the French countryside, under the warm glow of a sky near sunset. Tall sunflowers tower over bunches of other vividly coloured flowers in tones of yellow, violet, red echoing the colours of objects in the atmospheric distance. On the lake a couple row in a small boat. Painted in quick strokes and luminous, vibrant dabs of oil colours, Flower Beds epitomises the concerns of colour, light, atmosphere and relaxed, easygoing subject matter of the Impressionist school of painters. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder and chief driving force behind the French Impressionist school of painting. Born in Paris, Monet studied with Eugene Boudin, who taught the basics of oil painting and plein-air (open air) easel painting, and later with painter Charles Gleyre, eventually befriending fellow Impressionists Manet, Renoir, Bazille and others. Rejected by the Paris Salon and other venues of the 19th century academic establishment, the Impressionists painted directly from nature, capturing fleeting moments in time, in bright, broken colour and small, rapid brushstrokes. Monet lived and studied in London and Holland, producing many paintings, until the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where his painting Impression: Sunrise gained notoriety and earned the group its famous moniker. Following the death of his child and of his first wife Camille, Monet settled in Giverny, where increasing success allowed him to establish a home and studio surrounded by elaborate gardens. Monet painted many landscapes, including garden scenes and his famous Cathedral series, with increasing concerns for light, colour and atmosphere, with a concern for colour and shapes that in his older age bordered on a kind of abstraction, making him one of the most beloved painters of the modern era.