A caricaturist beyond suspicion
Is this a caricature?
Claude Monet
When Claude Monet, one of the founders of the Impressionist movement, was a teenager he was devoted to caricature portraits. In 1845 the young Claude Oscar Monet moved with his family to Le Havre. He started selling his caricatures for ten or twenty francs to the people in the street. He signed his charcoals “Oscar Monet”.
Hard to believe? Read his own words.
“I started selling my portraits. Sizing up my customer, I charged ten or twenty francs a caricature, and it worked like a charm. Within a month my clientele had doubled. Had I gone on like that I’d be a millionaire today. Soon I was looked up to in the town, I was ‘somebody’. In the shop-window of the one and only framemaker who could eke out a livelihood in Le Havre, my caricatures were impudently displayed, five or six abreast, in beaded frames or behind glass like very fine works of art, and when I saw troops of bystanders gazing at them in admiration, pointing at them and crying ‘Why, that’s so-and-so!’, I was just bursting with pride.”
Who would have thought? But looking more closely what is Impressionism if not the attempt to capture an instant , a singular moment in time on the canvas: the impression indeed and not necessarily the reality of nature by blurring the edges and exagerrating lights and colours? So does a caricature portrait that seeks the impression of a person maintaing the resemblance while exaggerating disproportionately some focal elements. Both techniques achieve a realistic effect yet surreal. Monet Impressionism is nothing but a masterful caricature of nature.