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Lot Essay
Perhaps no other subject fascinated Claude Monet so intensively and persistently than the elaborate gardens he constructed at his home in Giverny. During the last twenty-five years of his life the artist devoted himself almost single-mindedly to depicting the flowing planes of flowers, towering willow trees and the expansive waterlily pond that he had fashioned within the grounds, producing an astonishingly complex and diverse group of canvases that capture the unique atmosphere of this arcadian landscape. The resulting paintings stand among the most innovative and influential works of Monet’s entire oeuvre—while they affirm his life-long belief in the primacy of vision and experience, they are in many ways more abstract and daring than anything he had previously painted, and as such, offer a visionary, modern approach to painting for the twentieth century.
The present Nymphéas comes from a small, concentrated series of fifteen canvases painted in a moment of intensive creativity in 1907 (Wildenstein, nos. 1703-1717). Having spent the cold, wet winter months re-touching the previous year’s output in his studio, Monet was eager to return to the water garden as soon as the weather allowed. Over the course of the spring and summer, he began to explore a new variation on his favored subject, employing a rare vertical format and an intensely close-up, cropped view to capture the dramatic, shimmering effects of light on his waterlily pond. Monet was clearly pleased with the final outcome of this approach, choosing to feature a large portion of the series, including this painting, in his celebrated exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in the spring of 1909. This marked the first occasion that the waterlily paintings were seen together in a single show.
Monet had moved his family to Giverny in the spring of 1883, in search of a permanent base which they could finally call home after years of upheaval. Situated some forty miles from Paris, at the confluence of the Seine and the river Epte, Giverny was a small farming community of just three hundred inhabitants, a countryside enclave that remained untouched by the encroaching modernization which had dramatically altered scores of villages and hamlets along the Seine. Here, Monet found the tranquil retreat for which he had been searching, renting a sprawling, pink stucco house called La Pressoir (The Cider Press) from a wealthy local landowner who had recently retired to nearby Vernon. Sandwiched between the main village road and the regional thoroughfare connecting Vernon and Gasny, the house boasted a kitchen garden and orchard, as well as a barn to the west that Monet soon converted into a studio.
When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet made the swift decision to purchase it, “certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,” he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., 1995, p. 175). Monet immediately began tearing up the existing gardens and planting extensive beds of flowers, together with wide arches over which grew tumbling clematis and roses. Three years later, he acquired an adjacent plot of land—a small meadow that lay beyond the railroad tracks bordering the end of the garden, flanked on one side by a small tributary known as the Ru. A modest pond lay within this meadow, and Monet soon applied to the local government for permission to refresh it “for the purpose of cultivating aquatic plants” (quoted in ibid., p. 176). Over the years that followed, this seemingly simple request would enable Monet to create the extraordinary landscape that served as the basis for his art for much of the rest of his life. By the autumn of 1893, he had converted nearly one thousand square meters into a lavish waterlily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge at one end, and enhanced by an artful arrangement of flowers, trees and shrubs along its banks.
Despite the extensive time, passion, and funds that Monet devoted to his ambitious horticultural project, he did not immediately embark upon painting the water garden, instead waiting for the plants to develop and mature naturally. It was not until the closing years of the nineteenth century that he first depicted the verdant paradise he had fashioned. As he later explained, “It took me some time to understand my waterlilies. A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation—how wonderful my pond was—and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment” (quoted in S. Koja, Claude Monet, exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie, Vienna, 1996, p. 146).
Shortly thereafter, Monet decided the pond needed to be extended, which would allow him to attain a larger surface with greater and more varied visual effects. There was no more space in his land as it stood, so the artist set about purchasing part of a meadow on the other side of the Ru. Altering the course of this tributary, Monet was able to triple the size of the pond. From this point on, the reflections of the surface of the water intersected by the tranquil floating blooms became the predominant focus of his waterlily paintings. Monet gradually removed references to the surrounding landscape, eliminating the banks along the edge of the pool, the horizon line, and other stable pictorial elements, to focus solely on transient light effects, the shimmering water, and ephemeral reflections of the constantly changing skies above.
As the artist explained, this environment offered endless inspiration for a painter: “I have painted so many of these waterlilies, always shifting my vantage point, changing the motif according to the seasons of the year and then according to the different effects of light the seasons create as they change. And, of course, the effect does change, constantly, not only from one season to another, but from one minute to the next as well, for the water flowers are far from being the whole spectacle; indeed, they are only its accompaniment. The basic element of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance changes at every instant because of the way bits of the sky are reflected in it, giving it life and movement. The passing cloud, the fresh breeze, the threat or arrival of a rainstorm, the sudden fierce gust of wind, the fading or suddenly refulgent light—all these things, unnoticed by the untutored eye, create changes in color and alter the surface of the water. It can be smooth, unruffled, and then, suddenly, there will be a ripple, a movement that breaks up into almost imperceptible wavelets or seems to crease the surface slowly, making it look like a wide piece of watered silk. The same for the colors, for the changes of light and shade, the reflections” (quoted in C. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 289).
From 1905 onwards, Monet worked with a furious passion on this subject, producing more than sixty views of the waterlily pond, concentrating his focus on the surface of the water. He painted the present Nymphéas in 1907, at a time which he uncharacteristically proclaimed he was “full of fire and confidence” (quoted in P.H. Tucker, G.T.M. Shackelford and M.A. Stevens, Monet in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 47). Between April and September, he was so absorbed in his work that he wrote only six letters—a rare occurrence in the usually prolific correspondence that the artist maintained. “Here all goes well,” he finally reported to Durand-Ruel in the early autumn of that year. “I have worked, and I am still working, with passion” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, Monet or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1999, p. 379). Pleased with his progress, he invited the dealer to come and see the latest paintings at Giverny. “They are still a sort of groping research,” he claimed, “but I think that they are among my best efforts” (ibid., p. 379).
During this burst of creativity, Monet used an elongated, vertical format of canvas that was relatively unusual within his oeuvre. Each measuring roughly three feet in height, the fifteen paintings within this group appear to have drawn inspiration from Japanese hanging scrolls and decorative screens, examples of which Monet would have been deeply familiar with at this time. Long fascinated by Japanese art, he was an avid collector of ukiyo-e prints, their bold, colorful compositions filling the walls of the small salon and dining room, as well as lining the stairwells, of his home in Giverny. Monet regularly sought out particular prints by his favorite artists, and visited and corresponded with specialist dealers in Paris in his hunt for treasures. The growing taste for Asian art in France during the second half of the nineteenth century ensured that a vast array of Japanese objets d’art—including hanging scrolls, known as kakemono, folding screens, hand scrolls (makimono), ceramics and lacquerware—were readily available for connoisseurs and enthusiasts to peruse in the galleries, museums and collections around Paris. For Monet, these sources opened his imagination up to a different way of perceiving and interpreting nature, bringing the transient, ephemeral aspects of the natural world to the fore.
Each of the 1907 paintings take a close-up view of the waterlily pond, looking down on the surface from above, allowing the water and the delicate aquatic plants to fill the canvas entirely. The principle focus of these works is the channel of light that runs down the middle of the composition, recording the reflection of the constantly shifting sky seen through the willows at the western edge of the pond. In some paintings from the group, the water is alight with the fiery red hues of sunset, while in others, the diffused light of an overcast grey day casts the scene in a cool palette of lavenders.
In the present Nymphéas, Monet deployed a variety of painterly techniques to masterfully capture both the reflections of light on the surface of the pond, and the changing hues within its depths, filling the canvas with an abundance of color in the process. For example, the waterlilies gain a distinct sculptural presence through the build-up of pigment and rich impasto, affirming their position on the top of the pond, while around them, layers of lustrous pigment are laid on top of one another to suggest the refractions of light and the shifting tones of the water. The vertical streak of light that runs from the top to the lower edge of the canvas in a sinuous, meandering path creates a striking contrast with the dramatic dark greens and blues of the surrounding foliage and its reflections. This stream of light—delineated in softly gradated hues of golden yellow, pink, lilac, and light blue—distorts any sense of conventional pictorial perspective, creating a complex confluence of sky and water within the image.
Art historian Paul Hayes Tucker has astutely described these works as “without doubt some of the most compelling paintings Monet had yet produced… The dark reflections of the foliage are surprisingly active in their gestures and depths. They also occupy most of the canvas, as if the unseen world and its unchartable rhythms have become more important than what is tangible and confirmable… The light of the reflected sky ripples through the foliage at the top of the scene as it descends down the canvas, passing under the pads that push out from the darker reflections on the other side. The light then spills out into a twisted bell-like pool in the middle of the picture, creating eddies and surface patterns across the lower half of the image that contrast with the direction, shape, and orientation of the surrounding lily pads and foliage. Monet’s touch in this area is startlingly free, his paint strikingly porous…” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, pp. 47-48).
In May 1909, Monet’s long-awaited exhibition, Les Nymphéas: Séries de paysages d’eau, opened in Paris. While the title appears to have been an homage by the artist to Gustave Courbet’s earlier Paysages de mer paintings, the exhibition served as a powerful showcase for not only the range and dynamism of the waterlily series, but also the continued inventiveness of Monet’s painterly style during the opening decade of the new century. The exhibition featured forty-eight canvases, the largest number of which dated to 1907 and included the present Nymphéas, a clear reflection of the standing with which the artist himself considered these paintings. This was the first time the public had the opportunity to see Monet’s most recent work in five years, and the show was met with rapturous acclaim. For example, a critic for The Burlington Magazine wrote, “One has never seen anything like it. These studies of waterlilies and still water in every possible effect of light and at every hour of the day are beautiful to a degree which one can hardly express without seeming to exaggerate… There is no other living artist who could have given us these marvelous effects of light and shadow, this glorious feast of color” (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., 1995, p. 196).
Many praised Monet’s ability to continually push the boundaries of his own art, taking his depiction of the landscape to new heights in these works and attaining a level of abstraction that was entirely novel. Writing in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Roger Marx famously stated, “No more earth, no more sky, no limits now… Here the painter deliberately broke away from the teachings of Western tradition by not seeing pyramidal lines or a single point of focus. The nature of what is fixed, immutable, appears to him to contradict the very essence of fluidity… Through the incense of soft vapors, under a light veil or silvery mist, ‘the indecisive meets the precise.’ Certainty becomes conjecture and the enigma of the mystery opens the mind to the world of illusion and the infinity of dreams” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 50).
The present Nymphéas comes from a small, concentrated series of fifteen canvases painted in a moment of intensive creativity in 1907 (Wildenstein, nos. 1703-1717). Having spent the cold, wet winter months re-touching the previous year’s output in his studio, Monet was eager to return to the water garden as soon as the weather allowed. Over the course of the spring and summer, he began to explore a new variation on his favored subject, employing a rare vertical format and an intensely close-up, cropped view to capture the dramatic, shimmering effects of light on his waterlily pond. Monet was clearly pleased with the final outcome of this approach, choosing to feature a large portion of the series, including this painting, in his celebrated exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in the spring of 1909. This marked the first occasion that the waterlily paintings were seen together in a single show.
Monet had moved his family to Giverny in the spring of 1883, in search of a permanent base which they could finally call home after years of upheaval. Situated some forty miles from Paris, at the confluence of the Seine and the river Epte, Giverny was a small farming community of just three hundred inhabitants, a countryside enclave that remained untouched by the encroaching modernization which had dramatically altered scores of villages and hamlets along the Seine. Here, Monet found the tranquil retreat for which he had been searching, renting a sprawling, pink stucco house called La Pressoir (The Cider Press) from a wealthy local landowner who had recently retired to nearby Vernon. Sandwiched between the main village road and the regional thoroughfare connecting Vernon and Gasny, the house boasted a kitchen garden and orchard, as well as a barn to the west that Monet soon converted into a studio.
When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet made the swift decision to purchase it, “certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,” he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., 1995, p. 175). Monet immediately began tearing up the existing gardens and planting extensive beds of flowers, together with wide arches over which grew tumbling clematis and roses. Three years later, he acquired an adjacent plot of land—a small meadow that lay beyond the railroad tracks bordering the end of the garden, flanked on one side by a small tributary known as the Ru. A modest pond lay within this meadow, and Monet soon applied to the local government for permission to refresh it “for the purpose of cultivating aquatic plants” (quoted in ibid., p. 176). Over the years that followed, this seemingly simple request would enable Monet to create the extraordinary landscape that served as the basis for his art for much of the rest of his life. By the autumn of 1893, he had converted nearly one thousand square meters into a lavish waterlily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge at one end, and enhanced by an artful arrangement of flowers, trees and shrubs along its banks.
Despite the extensive time, passion, and funds that Monet devoted to his ambitious horticultural project, he did not immediately embark upon painting the water garden, instead waiting for the plants to develop and mature naturally. It was not until the closing years of the nineteenth century that he first depicted the verdant paradise he had fashioned. As he later explained, “It took me some time to understand my waterlilies. A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation—how wonderful my pond was—and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment” (quoted in S. Koja, Claude Monet, exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie, Vienna, 1996, p. 146).
Shortly thereafter, Monet decided the pond needed to be extended, which would allow him to attain a larger surface with greater and more varied visual effects. There was no more space in his land as it stood, so the artist set about purchasing part of a meadow on the other side of the Ru. Altering the course of this tributary, Monet was able to triple the size of the pond. From this point on, the reflections of the surface of the water intersected by the tranquil floating blooms became the predominant focus of his waterlily paintings. Monet gradually removed references to the surrounding landscape, eliminating the banks along the edge of the pool, the horizon line, and other stable pictorial elements, to focus solely on transient light effects, the shimmering water, and ephemeral reflections of the constantly changing skies above.
As the artist explained, this environment offered endless inspiration for a painter: “I have painted so many of these waterlilies, always shifting my vantage point, changing the motif according to the seasons of the year and then according to the different effects of light the seasons create as they change. And, of course, the effect does change, constantly, not only from one season to another, but from one minute to the next as well, for the water flowers are far from being the whole spectacle; indeed, they are only its accompaniment. The basic element of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance changes at every instant because of the way bits of the sky are reflected in it, giving it life and movement. The passing cloud, the fresh breeze, the threat or arrival of a rainstorm, the sudden fierce gust of wind, the fading or suddenly refulgent light—all these things, unnoticed by the untutored eye, create changes in color and alter the surface of the water. It can be smooth, unruffled, and then, suddenly, there will be a ripple, a movement that breaks up into almost imperceptible wavelets or seems to crease the surface slowly, making it look like a wide piece of watered silk. The same for the colors, for the changes of light and shade, the reflections” (quoted in C. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 289).
From 1905 onwards, Monet worked with a furious passion on this subject, producing more than sixty views of the waterlily pond, concentrating his focus on the surface of the water. He painted the present Nymphéas in 1907, at a time which he uncharacteristically proclaimed he was “full of fire and confidence” (quoted in P.H. Tucker, G.T.M. Shackelford and M.A. Stevens, Monet in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 47). Between April and September, he was so absorbed in his work that he wrote only six letters—a rare occurrence in the usually prolific correspondence that the artist maintained. “Here all goes well,” he finally reported to Durand-Ruel in the early autumn of that year. “I have worked, and I am still working, with passion” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, Monet or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1999, p. 379). Pleased with his progress, he invited the dealer to come and see the latest paintings at Giverny. “They are still a sort of groping research,” he claimed, “but I think that they are among my best efforts” (ibid., p. 379).
During this burst of creativity, Monet used an elongated, vertical format of canvas that was relatively unusual within his oeuvre. Each measuring roughly three feet in height, the fifteen paintings within this group appear to have drawn inspiration from Japanese hanging scrolls and decorative screens, examples of which Monet would have been deeply familiar with at this time. Long fascinated by Japanese art, he was an avid collector of ukiyo-e prints, their bold, colorful compositions filling the walls of the small salon and dining room, as well as lining the stairwells, of his home in Giverny. Monet regularly sought out particular prints by his favorite artists, and visited and corresponded with specialist dealers in Paris in his hunt for treasures. The growing taste for Asian art in France during the second half of the nineteenth century ensured that a vast array of Japanese objets d’art—including hanging scrolls, known as kakemono, folding screens, hand scrolls (makimono), ceramics and lacquerware—were readily available for connoisseurs and enthusiasts to peruse in the galleries, museums and collections around Paris. For Monet, these sources opened his imagination up to a different way of perceiving and interpreting nature, bringing the transient, ephemeral aspects of the natural world to the fore.
Each of the 1907 paintings take a close-up view of the waterlily pond, looking down on the surface from above, allowing the water and the delicate aquatic plants to fill the canvas entirely. The principle focus of these works is the channel of light that runs down the middle of the composition, recording the reflection of the constantly shifting sky seen through the willows at the western edge of the pond. In some paintings from the group, the water is alight with the fiery red hues of sunset, while in others, the diffused light of an overcast grey day casts the scene in a cool palette of lavenders.
In the present Nymphéas, Monet deployed a variety of painterly techniques to masterfully capture both the reflections of light on the surface of the pond, and the changing hues within its depths, filling the canvas with an abundance of color in the process. For example, the waterlilies gain a distinct sculptural presence through the build-up of pigment and rich impasto, affirming their position on the top of the pond, while around them, layers of lustrous pigment are laid on top of one another to suggest the refractions of light and the shifting tones of the water. The vertical streak of light that runs from the top to the lower edge of the canvas in a sinuous, meandering path creates a striking contrast with the dramatic dark greens and blues of the surrounding foliage and its reflections. This stream of light—delineated in softly gradated hues of golden yellow, pink, lilac, and light blue—distorts any sense of conventional pictorial perspective, creating a complex confluence of sky and water within the image.
Art historian Paul Hayes Tucker has astutely described these works as “without doubt some of the most compelling paintings Monet had yet produced… The dark reflections of the foliage are surprisingly active in their gestures and depths. They also occupy most of the canvas, as if the unseen world and its unchartable rhythms have become more important than what is tangible and confirmable… The light of the reflected sky ripples through the foliage at the top of the scene as it descends down the canvas, passing under the pads that push out from the darker reflections on the other side. The light then spills out into a twisted bell-like pool in the middle of the picture, creating eddies and surface patterns across the lower half of the image that contrast with the direction, shape, and orientation of the surrounding lily pads and foliage. Monet’s touch in this area is startlingly free, his paint strikingly porous…” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, pp. 47-48).
In May 1909, Monet’s long-awaited exhibition, Les Nymphéas: Séries de paysages d’eau, opened in Paris. While the title appears to have been an homage by the artist to Gustave Courbet’s earlier Paysages de mer paintings, the exhibition served as a powerful showcase for not only the range and dynamism of the waterlily series, but also the continued inventiveness of Monet’s painterly style during the opening decade of the new century. The exhibition featured forty-eight canvases, the largest number of which dated to 1907 and included the present Nymphéas, a clear reflection of the standing with which the artist himself considered these paintings. This was the first time the public had the opportunity to see Monet’s most recent work in five years, and the show was met with rapturous acclaim. For example, a critic for The Burlington Magazine wrote, “One has never seen anything like it. These studies of waterlilies and still water in every possible effect of light and at every hour of the day are beautiful to a degree which one can hardly express without seeming to exaggerate… There is no other living artist who could have given us these marvelous effects of light and shadow, this glorious feast of color” (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., 1995, p. 196).
Many praised Monet’s ability to continually push the boundaries of his own art, taking his depiction of the landscape to new heights in these works and attaining a level of abstraction that was entirely novel. Writing in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Roger Marx famously stated, “No more earth, no more sky, no limits now… Here the painter deliberately broke away from the teachings of Western tradition by not seeing pyramidal lines or a single point of focus. The nature of what is fixed, immutable, appears to him to contradict the very essence of fluidity… Through the incense of soft vapors, under a light veil or silvery mist, ‘the indecisive meets the precise.’ Certainty becomes conjecture and the enigma of the mystery opens the mind to the world of illusion and the infinity of dreams” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 50).