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Lot Essay
'My sensitivity, far from diminishing, has been sharpened by age, which holds no fears for me so long as unbroken communication with the outside world continues to fuel my curiosity, so long as my hand remains a ready and faithful interpreter of my perception.' — Claude Monet
Directing the eye across a garden in full bloom, Claude Monet’s painting La maison à travers les roses transforms the domestic garden into a radical exploration of pictorial space. Marking the centenary of Monet’s passing in 2026, institutions worldwide are revisiting his legacy, with a renewed attention on his final works that has brought into focus the quiet radicalism of his late style. Painted circa 1925–1926, La maison à travers les roses stands as a resonant expression of this moment, embodying the pictorial freedom — of surface, gesture, and spatial openness — that marked Monet’s groundbreaking approach to painting at this time. It also reveals the artist’s enduring influence on twentieth century art, later echoed in the immersive fields of Abstract Expressionism. The work comes from a concentrated series of paintings that Monet devoted to his house and flower gardens at Giverny, painted between 1922 and the end of his life. This body of work comprises three distinct series, each depicting the house from different angles, and includes a total of eighteen paintings. Of these, seven paintings of this intimate motif are now held in major museum collections, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, the Albertina Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art.
After achieving purchasing a house in Giverny in 1890, Monet transformed his home and the surroundings gardens, turning them into a lifelong source of inspiration which he would return to in paint repeatedly across nearly four decades. This garden became the fertile ground for many of Monet’s most celebrated series, including the Water Lilies and the Japanese Bridge paintings, as well as the monumental Grandes Décorations. Envisioned by Monet as a gift to the French state in celebration of the Allied victory in the First World War, the Grandes Décorations marked his most ambitious late undertaking. Executed on an unprecedented scale — with panels measuring up to two metres in height and 12.75 metres in length — the project redefined pictorial space not as a window onto the world but as an immersive environment, transporting the viewer from the physical realm into an imagined water garden. This radical rethinking of space and surface would continue to inform the painterly language of Monet’s later series, including La maison à travers les roses. What had once been understood as ‘decorative’ thus became, for Monet, a redefinition of painting itself: colour, light, and gesture no longer served ornamentation, but generated an enveloping spatial experience that would profoundly shape the trajectory of modern art.
Returning to the easel while working on this monumental undertaking, Monet faced the challenge of re-compressing an expanded spatial vision within the bounded surface of the canvas. Building on the all-over logic of the Grandes Décorations, the present work showcases Monet’s radical departure from traditional perspectival structure and single-point orientation. In Monet’s later years, his approach to colour and spatial construction began to shift, prompting a greater reliance on memory and prior experience. During this period, between 1922 and 1924, Monet painted the first series devoted to his house and garden at Giverny — eight works distinguished by a predominantly brownish‑green palette, giving them an antique, atmospheric quality. Beginning in the summer of 1925, he produced six works for the second series, embracing a markedly more vibrant palette — particularly pinks, purples, and greens — while continuing to build upon his earlier memory-based approach. In these later works, remembered vision is no longer withdrawn from experience, but crystallised through renewed, lived engagement with the garden.
Depicting the same west-facing façade as the other three works in this final series dedicated to his house, observed at shifting moments of the day, the present painting is animated by a vibrant palette and increasingly expressive brushwork, revealing the artist’s sustained and deeply personal engagement with his garden and home in his final years. Viewed through a veil of roses, the edge of the house appears indistinct and elusive, while a sense of space is implied through open margins, a loosened brushstroke, and an untrammelled compositional structure. Depth emerges not through recession, but through accumulation, layering, and the temporal rhythm of repeated gestures. This perceptual openness recalls Bridget Riley’s observation that ‘Monet seems to paint what we actually experience in looking, the drifting and gathering of sight itself,’ (Mel Gooding, ‘The Experience of Painting’ in R. Kudielka (ed.), The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1999, p. 143) a condition in which vision unfolds over time rather than resolving into stable form.
Monet’s late shift — marked by the dissolution of pictorial depth and the emergence of a decentralised, all-over surface — would be decisive for the course of post-war abstraction. As Clement Greenberg wrote, ‘Twenty years after Monet’s death, his practice has become the point of departure for a new tendency in painting,’ (C. Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’, Partisan Review, 1948) characterised by a polyphonic structure in which pictorial elements repeat across the surface without hierarchy, beginning or end. These ideas would find their fullest resonance among a younger generation of artists after the Second World War. While Joan Mitchell never explicitly acknowledged Monet as a direct influence, her permanent relocation to France in 1959 and subsequent life in Vétheuil, in close proximity to Monet’s gardens at Giverny, place her work in an environment profoundly shaped by the Impressionist painter’s legacy. Within this shared landscape, Mitchell’s densely worked canvases, grounded in remembered experience rather than direct observation, exhibit a distinctive approach. Her use of rhythm, color, and layered gesture resonates with Monet’s late works, resulting in a modern, emotionally charged pictorial language shaped by memory and sensation.
Directing the eye across a garden in full bloom, Claude Monet’s painting La maison à travers les roses transforms the domestic garden into a radical exploration of pictorial space. Marking the centenary of Monet’s passing in 2026, institutions worldwide are revisiting his legacy, with a renewed attention on his final works that has brought into focus the quiet radicalism of his late style. Painted circa 1925–1926, La maison à travers les roses stands as a resonant expression of this moment, embodying the pictorial freedom — of surface, gesture, and spatial openness — that marked Monet’s groundbreaking approach to painting at this time. It also reveals the artist’s enduring influence on twentieth century art, later echoed in the immersive fields of Abstract Expressionism. The work comes from a concentrated series of paintings that Monet devoted to his house and flower gardens at Giverny, painted between 1922 and the end of his life. This body of work comprises three distinct series, each depicting the house from different angles, and includes a total of eighteen paintings. Of these, seven paintings of this intimate motif are now held in major museum collections, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, the Albertina Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art.
After achieving purchasing a house in Giverny in 1890, Monet transformed his home and the surroundings gardens, turning them into a lifelong source of inspiration which he would return to in paint repeatedly across nearly four decades. This garden became the fertile ground for many of Monet’s most celebrated series, including the Water Lilies and the Japanese Bridge paintings, as well as the monumental Grandes Décorations. Envisioned by Monet as a gift to the French state in celebration of the Allied victory in the First World War, the Grandes Décorations marked his most ambitious late undertaking. Executed on an unprecedented scale — with panels measuring up to two metres in height and 12.75 metres in length — the project redefined pictorial space not as a window onto the world but as an immersive environment, transporting the viewer from the physical realm into an imagined water garden. This radical rethinking of space and surface would continue to inform the painterly language of Monet’s later series, including La maison à travers les roses. What had once been understood as ‘decorative’ thus became, for Monet, a redefinition of painting itself: colour, light, and gesture no longer served ornamentation, but generated an enveloping spatial experience that would profoundly shape the trajectory of modern art.
Returning to the easel while working on this monumental undertaking, Monet faced the challenge of re-compressing an expanded spatial vision within the bounded surface of the canvas. Building on the all-over logic of the Grandes Décorations, the present work showcases Monet’s radical departure from traditional perspectival structure and single-point orientation. In Monet’s later years, his approach to colour and spatial construction began to shift, prompting a greater reliance on memory and prior experience. During this period, between 1922 and 1924, Monet painted the first series devoted to his house and garden at Giverny — eight works distinguished by a predominantly brownish‑green palette, giving them an antique, atmospheric quality. Beginning in the summer of 1925, he produced six works for the second series, embracing a markedly more vibrant palette — particularly pinks, purples, and greens — while continuing to build upon his earlier memory-based approach. In these later works, remembered vision is no longer withdrawn from experience, but crystallised through renewed, lived engagement with the garden.
Depicting the same west-facing façade as the other three works in this final series dedicated to his house, observed at shifting moments of the day, the present painting is animated by a vibrant palette and increasingly expressive brushwork, revealing the artist’s sustained and deeply personal engagement with his garden and home in his final years. Viewed through a veil of roses, the edge of the house appears indistinct and elusive, while a sense of space is implied through open margins, a loosened brushstroke, and an untrammelled compositional structure. Depth emerges not through recession, but through accumulation, layering, and the temporal rhythm of repeated gestures. This perceptual openness recalls Bridget Riley’s observation that ‘Monet seems to paint what we actually experience in looking, the drifting and gathering of sight itself,’ (Mel Gooding, ‘The Experience of Painting’ in R. Kudielka (ed.), The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1999, p. 143) a condition in which vision unfolds over time rather than resolving into stable form.
Monet’s late shift — marked by the dissolution of pictorial depth and the emergence of a decentralised, all-over surface — would be decisive for the course of post-war abstraction. As Clement Greenberg wrote, ‘Twenty years after Monet’s death, his practice has become the point of departure for a new tendency in painting,’ (C. Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’, Partisan Review, 1948) characterised by a polyphonic structure in which pictorial elements repeat across the surface without hierarchy, beginning or end. These ideas would find their fullest resonance among a younger generation of artists after the Second World War. While Joan Mitchell never explicitly acknowledged Monet as a direct influence, her permanent relocation to France in 1959 and subsequent life in Vétheuil, in close proximity to Monet’s gardens at Giverny, place her work in an environment profoundly shaped by the Impressionist painter’s legacy. Within this shared landscape, Mitchell’s densely worked canvases, grounded in remembered experience rather than direct observation, exhibit a distinctive approach. Her use of rhythm, color, and layered gesture resonates with Monet’s late works, resulting in a modern, emotionally charged pictorial language shaped by memory and sensation.