Léon Monet (1836-1917) is the older brother of Claude Monet (1840-1926). It remained unnoticed until the research from which the exhibition at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris emerged. However, he deserves attention for two reasons, his profession and his collection. By profession, Léon is in the colors, like Claude, but otherwise.
After a youth of which we know almost nothing, he was a merchant in Rouen, then, from 1869, a sales representative for the Basel company Geigy et Cie, specializing in chemical dyes. In 1872, he founded with industrialists from the Rouen region the Industrial Company of Rouen (SIR), which aims to develop production and marketing in the field of textiles, an ancient local tradition. He was in turn archivist, report writer or member of the SIR’s chemistry committee, and suggested creating a museum of industrial art. In 1892, Geigy et Cie established a factory in Maromme, a suburb of Rouen, to circumvent customs duties between France and Switzerland, and Léon ran it until the end of his life.
In a market where German chemists dominate, he introduces his own novelties, developed in a laboratory nicknamed “colorful kitchen”. André Gide (1869-1951), nephew of another Rouen industrialist, having visited the Maromme factory, mentioned him in 1926 in If the grain does not die : “A small pavilion, always closed, where the colors were secretly made, exhaled a strange odor (…). » An instructive room is devoted to these activities, from collections of colorful samples to Japanese prints.
sure eye
That Monet’s brother was a master of artificial colors is intriguing. A hypothesis immediately comes to mind: would he have allowed his brother to have access to synthetic pigments produced by his chemists, whose brilliance is more intense than that of natural pigments, of mineral or vegetable origin? It is impossible to say, if only because it is extremely difficult to know with certainty whether such a color was produced by Geigy et Cie or by another company in the sector.
Léon strongly supports the artistic beginnings of his brother and, by extension, those of his friends Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley.
What is easy to say, conversely, is that Léon strongly supported the artistic beginnings of his brother and, by extension, those of his friends Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. He bought canvases from them in the second half of the 1860s, long before the word “Impressionism” was printed, and convinced some of his friends to do the same.
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