I once knew a man who loved nature. When he was young, he used to climb mountains. Alpinism was his passion. The top of the world was the place where he could find peace, where it was quiet, away from the annoying sounds of the city. As he grew older, he got married and had children. Time passed before him and soon he felt the desire to be in the middle of the nature once more. He didn’t have time or money to climb mountains anymore. So in the middle of the city, in the little garden in front of his flat he set a tent.

Some people feel the nature so ardent in their soul that they transform the environment around them, so they could feel peace once again. Claude Monet painted nature, but at the end of his life he wanted to be inserted in it as in a dream. He brought nature to his home, by building a paradise garden at Giverny. Monet builds, this way, a live canvas made by the painter’s artistic fantasy. He managed to perfectly harmonize with his painting a real and physically place, developing the naturally topic drawn before actually settling it on canvas. This operation is directed towards the continuous search of merger with the beauty and untouched nature.

At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his family rented a house situated near the road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny. He transformed the barn into a painting studio. The beautiful landscape gave Monet suitable motifs for his paintings. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio. A spacious building well lit with skylights. At the end of 1890 he could buy this property, when his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel had been increasing success in selling his paintings. Then in 1893 he bought a plot on the South border of the property, where, after getting the authorization, he created the famous water garden with the floating water lilies, irises, willow trees and carob tree planted around. After the garden had been accomplished, it was extended in 1901. Monet had proven a tremendous care for the flower beds and hedges, and the choice of plant species: anemones, irises, poppies and climber roses. Monet was able, by methods he only knew, to grow in the garden many exotic plants from Mexico or China. He wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books.

His live opera had become the meeting point for the artist’s friends, many of his admirers and nature passionate. With time the garden was transformed into a chromatic combination scattered on several paintings: Artist’s Garden at Giverny, Garden Path at Giverny, The Japanese Bridge, Blutentore in Giverny and the famous series of the Water Lilies.

Thus, the real and final meaning of “en plain air” painting finds full realization in the choice of doing a work, transformed into a harmonious and pictorially place. Therefore, his vision of nature was converted into reality in order to be transferred on canvas.

The art critic Arsene Alexandre wrote in “Le Figaro” newspaper that the artist included in the garden “all the colors of a palette and the tones of a fanfare.” The Giverny place is a “new and unusual show, unexpected as all major surprises.” Marcel Proust described the garden as “a really artistic implementation, more than a model for works, a painted already completed, which glows in the eyes of a great painter.”

“In order to learn to draw, you must learn to see”. These words took my attention when I recently read a book about painting. That is how I learned that an object hasn’t a single color, but an infinity of shades. Rendering reality as it is it’s almost impossible. However, I can say that the artist paints only the reality he sees.

Monet began to make associations between reality, nature and painting, following the guidance he received from Eugene Boudin, with whom he began to paint outdoors. After meeting with the artist, Monet wrote: “Boudin, with a tireless kindness, began to guidance me. Finally, my eyes opened and I truly understood nature. In the same time, I learned to love her”.

Monet’s words reminded me of Plato’s story. The greek philosopher imagined a cave in which people, who are tied, look towards a wall to the shadows caused by objects paraded before a fire behind the prisoners. The shadows are seen by people as being the only reality. One of the prisoners managed to escape and goes outside the cave. He contemplates the sun and the surrounding nature. He comes back in the cave to tell the other prisoners what is the actual reality. Nobody believes him. Fortunately, the “reality” drawn by a painter is admired by fans of beauty, even if it is not the true embodiment of the object that stands in front of the artist.

Every artist, at the beginning of his career, has a person who helps him gain maturity in his work. He is the person who will help him define his manner of painting, the person from whom he will learn techniques and tricks that enhance his own ideas. The young artist should add his own vision and experiences to the master’s ideas, tips and tricks to become unique.

For Monet, Boudin was the one who paved the way to an artistic career and the same who made the world aware of the artist Claude Monet. Because of his master, young Monet decided to become a professional artist, painting in direct contact with the reality of nature. The first painting by Monet, where he signed Monet O. 58, is a landscape near the village Rouelles with the water flowing along. The young artists’ passion once opened it could not be taken away even by the painters’ father. In those times artists were not seen kindly, so Monet was left without any financial support from his family, except for an aunt.

The vision of reality will enrich along his life. Called to military service, he goes to Africa, where he fell in love with light and color. While some artists choose to spread darkness, shadows on canvas, Monet prefers the sun and shades that render nature. A man has a lot of stops along the way, in which he has the opportunity to change all or just to improve his vision. Africa was for Monet another stop, where he could see nature in a new light: “My view on things has improved. At first, I didn’t realize that. The impressions of light and color formed there only later revealed, but already sprouted in me a desire for future searches,” wrote the young artist.

If in Africa, Monet looked at nature alone, when he came back, he met the dutch men Johann Barthold Jongkind, who explained to him the practice and motivation of his work, thus complementing the guidance of Boudin. “Since then, he became my true master, whom I owe my views final education,” Monet described the meeting with Jongkind.

Landscapes will define Monet’s work. The most representative paintings are the 250 variations of the famed Water Lilies, painted in the last twenty years of his life. The artist Claude Monet is the one who also informed the world about France’s natural wealth.

Over the years, Monet took the ideas of painters he met along the way, such as Jongkind and Boudin, and combined them with his own unique style and footprint. Monet was able to adapt and borrow his art from his surrounding molding his art into what it is so well known for today.

Therefore, if you consider those next to you as being masters, regardless of their age or training, take the time to open your mind, and listen to what they have to say. You will find out that you become a richer artists just by listening to others.

On June 23, 2010, if you have a few million dollars and happen to be in New York at Shotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House, perhaps you will go home with a Monet in your collection. To be more specific, Lot 254, or Giverny, La Roseraie De Monet. According to reporters, the painting was not seen by the general public since a 1936 exhibition in Paris. The painting has remained in the Monet family for decades since the artist’s son, Michel, purchased the painting in the twenties.

Like the other lilies, this Nymphèas was painted in Monet’s garden in northern France as a part of 250 works the artist painted nearing the end of his life.

The Water Lilies Series

These 250 works of water lilies are also known as Nymphèas. The works were painted during the last generation of his life. The subject matter reveals Monet’s flower garden and pond in Giverny, France, which was constructed by Monet himself. Though Monet was a true purveyor of Impressionism, it is known that he suffered from cataracts in old age, obviously affecting the execution of his artwork. The growing loss of his eyesight, however, assisted in the creation of one of the most treasured painting series in art history. Yet, the revolutionary brushstrokes, when compared to Monet’s earlier paintings, cannot be attributed to the classic interpretation of Impressionism or the artist’s deteriorating eyesight alone.

The viewer must remember that Monet’s series came not only from vision, but expression and execution of memory and emotion. To some degree Monet’s series is in the vein of Expressionism. Monet, through each brushstroke and palette color, re-envisions the garden that he cared for over the course of thirty years. In noting the true impression of each color, Monet integrates a bit of post-impressionist Pointillism in terms of technique but not style.

An artist will often squint at an artwork to dilute the object itself into a basic form or series of shades to better discern a color or to not impose definitive restrictions. Monet, though losing his eyesight, no longer squints. He uses a scientific approach and an emotional approach to execute the series, resulting in a revolutionary body of work that evokes a style-identity crisis in the art world, giving birth to supporting and opposing movements of art.

“The rush to live and to produce was alien to a period where calmness prevailed. M. Claude Monet belongs to quite a different age, one in which dizzying speed is the rule, where the creative person wants instant awareness of the universe and himself through quick and violent impressions…. He causes us to know and love beauty everywhere,” said art critic Roger Marx in a1909 article for the Gazete des Beauxes.

Marx adds, “M. Claude Monet pleases himself….his experience directed at recording the pleasures he experiences during the course of the day as he works in a single place…. The value of the theme lies in the potential for increasing the number of sensations aroused in the viewer and enriching their quality. His system is a familiar one, but M. Claude Monet has not heretofore undertaken to push its consequences quite so far.”

Monet’s Garden

Among the many flowers and trees in his garden were yellow irises, tulips, roses, and water lilies, as well as holly, maple, weeping willows, sycamores, apple, and chestnut trees. The pond was handcrafted by Monet himself.

A Gift From France To Monet

Only months after Monet’s death, France constructed two oval rooms to showcase eight mural pieces. The show opened in May of 1927. Since this time, different pieces of the series have been scattered in exhibitions across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others.

Monet’s Influence

Monet’s Water Lilies certainly enrich the sensations of the viewer lucky enough to see the Nymphèas series in person. His use of color and stroke communicate the visual look and feel of the garden, but more importantly, animate the garden in a way never before experienced in art. This impact places Monet as a favorite among many, influencing artists such as Degas and Renoir.

If you cannot make it to Christie’s for the auction, you can have a Monet of your own from overstockart.com. Yes, there are a few Nymphèas. Now, get your canvas, get into your garden, and start painting!

overstockArt.com, the leader in handmade oil painting art reproductions, released today its Mother’s Day Top 10 list. This year’s list names the top 10 oil paintings featuring images of motherhood.

Topping the chart is Claude Monet’s masterpiece Poppy Field in Argenteuil. Oil paintings by master artists Mary Cassatt, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir also made the list.

“Many master artists depicted images of motherhood in their oil paintings,” said Stacy Sasson, co-founder of overstockArt.com. “No other art form better exemplifies the tender, timeless bond between a mother and a child.”

The oil paintings that made the 2010 Mother’s Day Top 10 list are:

1. Poppy Field in Argenteuil, Claude Monet – In this colorful oil painting, originally created in 1873, Claude Monet painted his wife and son strolling together among the poppies.
2. Le tre eta della donna (Mother and Child), Gustav Klimt – Mother and Child is part of Klimt’s famous oil painting Three Ages of Woman. The painting depicts an image of a mother cradling her young son. The original was created in 1905, three years after the death of Klimt’s baby son, Otto.
3. Breakfast in Bed 1897, Mary Cassatt – The subject of mothers and children recurred in many of Cassatt’s works. In this piece, a child’s attention wanders as she is held in her mother’s loving embrace.
4. First Steps, Vincent van Gogh – From late 1889 to 1890, while van Gogh was a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, he painted twenty-one copies of Jean-François Millet’s works. In January 1890, van Gogh transferred a photograph of Millet’s First Steps to canvas.
5. Maternity, Pablo Picasso – This stunning oil painting, originally created in 1905, depicts the intimate bond of mother and child.
6. Madame Monet and her Son, Claude Monet – This masterpiece, originally painted in 1875, depicts Monet’s first wife Claude and their eldest son, Jean.
7. Summertime, Mary Cassatt – Although never a mother herself, Cassatt principally painted children and scenes of motherhood. Summertime illustrates a mother and daughter enjoying a leisurely summer day boating. The original masterpiece was created in 1894.
8. Woman with a Parasol and Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside, Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Originally painted in 1874, this masterpiece depicts a mother relaxing in the grass while her young child wanders off in behind her in the tall grass.
9. Hope II, Gustav Klimt – Although images of women and children are frequent in the history of art, depictions of pregnancy are rare. In Hope II a woman lowers her head toward her swelling belly. The original masterpiece was created in 1907-08.
10. Pieta, Vincent van Gogh – Originally created in 1889 while van Gogh was staying at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, Pieta is the agonizing depiction of Mary in sorrow over her dead son.

The Mother’s Day Top 10 List was composed by pulling overstockArt.com sales data from April 2009 to March 2010. “Mother’s Day is our third busiest selling period of the year,” said Sasson. “People love giving their moms the gift of art for Mother’s Day – it is a wonderful expression of love that will last a lifetime.”

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa most talked about oil painting of the decade.

The oil paintings that received the most media attention in the last decade are:

1. The Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci – featured in the #1 best selling book of the decade and the 2006 blockbuster movie “The Da Vinci Code,” starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou.
2. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Gustav Klimt – according to Forbes magazine, Adele is the most expensive oil painting in history. The painting was purchased by Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon, in 2006 for a record breaking $135 million. Today it is proclaimed as Manhattan’s Mona Lisa as it hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York City.
3. Girl with Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer – subject of the 2003 film “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson.
4. Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh - according to overstockArt.com’s statistics, Starry Night was the most popular and best-selling oil painting of the last decade.
5. Le Rêve (The Dream in French), Pablo Picasso – In an accident witnessed by a group that included Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi in 2006, casino magnate Steve Wynn accidentally created a 6-inch tear in Picasso’s 74-year-old painting. Before the incident, he had agreed to sell Le Rêve for $139 million to Steven A. Cohen, thus making it the most expensive sale of all time. Needless to say Wynn kept the painting and has had it restored.
6. Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress, Frida Kahlo – featured in the 2002 biopic “Frida,” starring Salma Hayek and Mía Maestro.
7. The Café Terrace, Vincent van Gogh – according to overstockArt.com’s statistics, The Café Terrace was the second-highest sold oil painting of the last decade. The small coffee shop in Arles has become one of Southern France’s most sought after attractions.
8. Untitled, Mark Rothko – has become the talk of the town ever since it has been featured on the AMC’s Emmy® and Golden Globe®-winning series “Mad Men.”
9. The Scream, Edvard Munch – In 2004, the most treasured Modern Art Nordic piece, The Scream, by Edvard Munch, was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. The painting was later recovered in 2006. The Scream sustained considerable damage and had to be restored before going back on display in 2008.
10. Poppies near Vetheuil, Claude Monet – one of the four paintings stolen from the Buehrle Foundation museum in Zurich in 2008. The painting was later recovered by Swiss police.

According to Sasson, there is a connection between sales and media placement, “A lot of people like to keep up with the latest trends in design, and the media is a key influencer in what is deemed hip and desirable.” In 2007 The Mona Lisa was named overstockArt.com’s seventh top-selling oil painting of the year. “This is a prime example of the correlation between sales and media placement of oil paintings. The Mona Lisa did not make the annual Top Ten list until after ‘The Da Vinci Code’ film was released and the renowned work of art was featured in it.”

In the past decade overstockArt.com sold more than a million oil paintings. They are one of the Web’s most successful distributors of wall décor items with over 10,000 daily visitors and 100,000 loyal customers.

overstockArt.com, the leader in handmade oil painting art reproductions, has officially released its Top 10 list of the most popular oil paintings from the past decade. Topping the list is Vincent van Gogh’s irrefutable magnum opus, Starry Night.

“We release an annual Top 10 list and thought it would be interesting to look back over the past decade to determine the trendiest and most sought after hand painted oil painting reproductions,” said David Sasson, CEO of overstockArt.com. “Not surprisingly, the notoriously eccentric artist, Van Gogh, leads the list with his masterpieces Starry Night and Café Terrace at Night.” According to overstockArt.com’s statistics, Van Gogh’s total sales numbers have far exceeded those of any of the other great masters.

TOP 10 OIL PAINTINGS OF THE DECADE Most popular art on the planet: courtesy of overstockArt.com

RANK ARTIST MASTERPIECE #1 Vincent Van Gogh Starry Nightt #2 Vincent Van Gogh Cafe Terrace at Night #3 Gustav Klimt The Kiss #4 Claude Monet Poppy Field at Argenteuil #5 Leonardo Da Vinci The Mona Lisa #6 Pablo Picasso Le Rêve (The Dream) #7 Pierre Auguste Renoir Luncheon of the Boating Party #8 Edvard Munch The Scream #9 Georgia O'Keeffe Red Cannas #10 Salvador Dali Persistence of Memory

In the past decade overstockArt.com sold more than a million oil paintings. They are one of the Web’s most successful distributors of wall décor items with over 10,000 daily visitors and 100,000 loyal customers. “As the Modern Art movement was conquering the auction floors getting record breaking numbers in Sotheby’s and Christie’s, we slowly became the destination for art lovers who could not afford the high price tags of galleries, but wanted to enjoy the hand painted art of the great masters in their homes,” explained Sasson.

One of the interesting points that the top 10 oil paintings of the decade presents is that the modern artists from the turn of the last century such as Van Gogh, Monet and Klimt are still the most desirable artists in the world. “Our numbers indicate that as the years turn and our world evolves some things remain consistent,” said Sasson. “People are still captivated by the elegance and beauty that the classic artists bring to their home. It will be interesting to see when, if ever, this trend begins to fade.”