Monets are going for millions. But don’t feel sorry for the tight-fisted artist, says antonia bland
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Poor old Claude Monet, missing out on all this lovely dosh. Throughout his life, when he wasn't fretting about colour and light, he was worrying about money.
As a teenager he boasted of hiding away any money he made from his early caricatures with one of his aunts, allowing himself the most "insignificant pocket money".
He became notorious for his begging letters to friends, dripping with self-pity and crocodile tears, in which he complained about his rent being in arrears and the high cost of materials and food for his family. He stiffed his servants, and made his ailing wife Camille feel guilty about the cost of her medicine.
And yet this was no poor, starving artist. He was the son of a comfortable middle-class merchant and had no real money worries - just a penchant for moaning about it. He was the master sponger.
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Monet stiffed
his servants and
made his ailing
wife Camille
feel guilty about
the cost of her
medicine |
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He once wrote to his wealthier painter friend Frederic Bazille saying "I tried to drown myself" and asking him to send money.
Bazille, born to rich landowners, moved in with Monet and shared his studio, paying most of the rent for more than a decade. In 1868 he bought Monet's Women in the Garden for 2,500 francs - such a huge sum that he struggled to pay it off in monthly instalments.
When Bazille died at 29 in the Franco-Prussian war, Monet (left), who had fled to London rather than enlist, needed a new best friend. He found Ernest Hoschede, a Parisian businessman, who was to die in 1891 an impecunious cuckold. Impecunious because he had bought so many of Monet's works; a cuckold because Monet stole his glamorous wife, Alice, a Belgian heiress. They married within a year of Hoschede's death.
One suspects that if Monet were alive today, he would be ferreting away the £18m paid at Christie's last night for Waterloo Bridge, Temps Couvert - for fear of having to share it with his long-suffering friends.
FIRST POSTED JUNE 19, 2007
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