Thirty years looking at a water garden: the Water Lilies paintings by Monet
Making sense of Monet's career achievement, the Nymphéas Cycle, from Giverny to the Orangerie.
Monet's Water Lilies, the achievement of a lifetime
With the story of the "Rouen Cathedral series", we discovered how Monet pursued a band of color in his series of poplars, haystacks, and cathedrals.
Here, we wonder at the fact that Giverny's pond became, in effect, Monet's palette. This time, the band of color was on his doorstep, allowing him to chase the shifting hues of every petal and leaf as they merged into the ever-changing skies reflected on the surface of the water.
Thirty years of intense observation at Giverny resulted in Monet's masterpiece, the Water Lilies cycle at the Orangerie.
Giverny, or the end of Monet's financial worries
Vincent van Gogh's struggle for recognition, between his arrival in Paris and suicide, lasted two years. By contrast, Claude Monet faced difficulties for a quarter of a century.
For the first time translated into English, here are Monet's own letters expressing his financial despair:
- At 28 years of age, with a young son, Monet begs a friend for money to buy coal:
I'm penniless. I spent almost the whole day today without fire, and the child has a cold. It's not good without a fire with a child and a wife.
Six months later, Monet could not afford to feed his child. He had just been thrown out of a hostel, and, in despair, attempted suicide:
I was so upset yesterday that I made the mistake of throwing myself into the water. Fortunately, no harm came of it.
- When Monet was 43, the extended family needed to rent a house in Giverny. He sent numerous letters to Durand-Ruel, his art dealer, asking for funds:
I'm completely penniless; I couldn't even have come to Paris today, for lack of money.
Once the family moved to Giverny, Monet visited his art dealer, who was absent.
I had to leave without a penny in my pocket. I beg you not to fail to send me a banknote tomorrow, 300 or 400 francs. We are settled, but without any provisions or money.
Yet, within days, he wrote, “I am in raptures. Giverny is a splendid place for me”. Monet was about to spend the next 43 years looking at that enchanting sight.
Giverny, a small 'water garden' that revolutionized painting
Ten years after the move to Giverny, the artist was, at long last, financially secure. After purchasing the house, Monet buys the nearby field and quickly sets out to create a decorative pond. The reason Monet gave for requesting permission from the authorities was:
This is only a thing for delight, eye's pleasure, and also a motif to paint.
Strolling around the pond sparked an idea in Monet's mind: what about reversing the process and being surrounded by the pond? Here is, translated into English for this story, a journalist's description of the 'oasis' of paintings Monet was working on:
They are models for a decoration he had already begun, large panel studies that he showed me in his studio.
Imagine a circular room whose picture rail, below the plinth, would be entirely occupied by a horizon of water stained with these vegetations.
Walls of a transparency alternately green and mauve, the calm and silence of the still water reflecting the spreading blooms. The tones are imprecise, deliciously nuanced, with a dreamlike delicacy.
In 1897, Monet envisioned a water horizon reflecting the colors of the sky across a circular room. As the Orangerie cycle was completed in 1926, it means the Nymphéas were the result of 30 years of observation.
A Japanese bridge in Normandy
Monet began painting the Japanese bridge and purchased more land to enlarge the pond further. Then, in 1914, the idea of a cycle of water lilies that had lain dormant returned. Monet is 74, had lost his wife Alice a few years previously, and just lost his son Jean. Yet, spring rejuvenated the old man, who wrote:
I am absorbed by the desire to paint. I even intend to undertake great things.
But as soon as Monet was gripped with the energy needed to deliver great things, the water lilies panels, the world fell into madness.
Painting the Water Lilies during the horrors of the First World War
For context, we only need one name, Verdun: 300 days, 300,000 dead, a deluge of 50 million shells whose tremors were felt 100 km away. Monet worried for his family, friends, and his artworks. Then, about himself:
As for me, I stay here anyway; if these savages are going to kill me, it will be among my paintings, in front of my entire life's work.
I got back to work, as it's still the best way to avoid dwelling too much on our sad times, although I'm a little ashamed to think about trivial research on shapes and colors while so many people are suffering and dying for us.
He had a large hangar built to provide sufficient space to work on the large canvases. In the summer, he could go outside and paint by the pond, and continue working in the studio in winter. However, he was not sheltered from the war. Ambulances drove past his window, and he gave vegetables from his garden to injured soldiers recovering in the village's hospital.
And in the last months of the war, the German shelling got close enough to perturb the silence of the Nymphéas studio.
The Nymphéas, Monet's response to barbarity
In November 1918, the day after the armistice, Monet sent a letter to the Prime Minister, his close friend Clémenceau:
I am about to finish two decorative panels, which I want to sign on Victory Day, and am writing to ask that they be offered to the State through you as intermediary. It is only a small thing, but it is the only way I have of taking part in the victory.
A few days later, Clémenceau, known to the French as 'the Tiger', turned up at Giverny.
Clémenceau stretched out his arms toward the painter. Without speaking, Monet walked toward him and simply asked, "Is it over?" —Yes.
And the two men hugged, weeping in that autumn garden where the roses had refrained from dying.
Monet's Water Lilies cycle, 30 years of observation and 12 years of work
By 1918, the cycle of Water Lilies was far from completion. Before the war, a doctor had confirmed Monet suffered from a cataract. The ensuing years were those of doubt, eye surgery, and negotiations with the State about the donation. And work, a lot of work. In February 1926, Monet wrote:
I work non-stop, despite my age and the weakness that overcomes me every day.
By April, Clémenceau stated that:
His panels are finished and will not be retouched.
Monet would not see the end of the year. The Orangerie panels would be revealed after his death, and later deemed to be the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. Is it a fair comparison? Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in his 60s and continued creating until his death, aged 88.
Monet worked on the Water Lilies cycle until he was 85, a few months before he died.
The Nymphéas, a peaceful meditation amidst a flowery aquarium
Before he set out to paint the Water Lilies cycle, Monet described what he had in mind:
I was tempted to use the theme of Water Lilies to decorate a living room. Along the walls, envelopping the surfaces with one unified motif, it would have provided the illusion of an endless whole, a wave without horizon and shore. Overworked nerves would have relaxed there, following the calming example of these stagnant waters.
To anyone who would have lived in that room, it would have offered the sanctuary of peaceful meditation in the midst of a flowery aquarium.
Later, explaining that he needed time to understand the water garden, he said:
All of a sudden, I had the revelation of the delights of my pond. I took my palette.
Maybe calling the water garden Monet's palette is not entirely poetic license? In terms of poetry, I cannot resist translating the words of one of the first people who saw the panels in 1918:
In this infinity, water and sky have no beginning and no ending. It seems that we are witnessing one of the first hours of the birth of the world.
Monet is just an eye... but, my God, what an eye!
So said Cézanne. Lila Cabot Perry, an American painter and neighbor at Giverny, discussed with Monet the art of seeing:
He said he wished he had been born blind and then suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him.
A pilgrimage to Giverny to understand Monet's Water Lilies series
These are not even my words, dear reader, but those of Gérald Van der Kemp:
It is essential to make a pilgrimage to Giverny, to this floral sanctuary, to better understand the artist and his sources of inspiration, and imagine him still living amongst us.
Who is Gérald Van der Kemp, you ask? In 1966, Michel Monet bequeathed Giverny and the artworks in his possession to the Institut de France. Giverny had become a pale shadow of what it had been during Monet's lifetime and needed restoration. Van der Kemp, a former director of Versailles castle, led the makeover, particularly so that the pond looks as Monet painted it.
Van der Kemp had some experience in saving masterpieces. In 1944, he single-handedly saved the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory from the Nazis, who were about to torch them.
Giverny is far more than a pretty garden: it is Monet's vegetal and watery palette. There is still much to share about Monet's own explanations, as well as the influence the Orangerie cycle had on other artists. That would take another story, for another day.
In the meantime, I trust, dear reader, that this journey to Giverny's floating world was a Moment of Wonder.
Sources
All French sources quoted below have been translated and edited for clarity by the author for this story:
Daniel Wildenstein; Claude Monet : biographie et catalogue raisonné. Tome III, 1887-1898, Peintures, and Tome IV: 1899-1926, Peintures.
“Bazille et ses amis”, Gaston Poulain, Monet’s letters to Frédéric Bazille.
Maurice Guillemot, "Claude Monet", La Revue illustrée, n° 7, 15 mars 1898.
Roger Marx, Les Nymphéas de M. Claude Monet. Gazette des beaux-arts, Juin 1909.
M. Kahn, Au jour le jour: Le jardin de Claude Monet, Le Temps, 7 juin 1904.
René Gimpel, Journal d’un collectionneur marchand de tableaux, 1963.
Sacha Guitry, Cinquante ans d’occupation, Omnibus, 1998, p. 461.
English language sources:
Reminiscences Of Claude Monet From 1889 To 1909, By Lilla Cabot Perry; The American Magazine Of Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, March 1927.
