Bridges 2011 Short Paper

``Matière'' plays an important role in paintings to create an atmosphere to tableaux. We investigated transition of feature of ``matière'' or texture features of Claude Monet's paintings because he painted many series of paintings in which he used little a bit different brushwork to the same tableau. As a first step to know texture feature of color images of his paintings we analyzed grayscaled images of paintings in seven composition categories by 2-D wavelet transform. Then we calculate an image characteristic amount from the result of wavelet multi-resolution analysis of the painting images to clarify their texture feature quantitatively. We also analyzed images of paintings with co-occurrence matrix and calculate amount of characteristics. As a result, we are able to confirm the changes of the brushwork in the case of the series of the paintings “water lily” from 1899 to 1926. This result indicates that we can use the image characteristic amounts as objective index of texture feature or ``Matière'' of paintings and we can recognize the change of ``Matière'' alter with time in the series of paintings.