Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Tóquio Fuji Art Museum, Tóquio, Japão
OST - 101x90 - 1908

In the 1890s, Monet enthusiastically created some series of the paintings including Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral and Morning on the Seine. It was in 1897 that Monet began to paint the water lilies in the pond of the Japanese garden at his home in Giverny. He created eight paintings in the first series of Water Lilies, and in 1902 started to work in earnest on the execution of the Water Lilies series. Monet eventually created more than 300 paintings that depicted his garden and pond in Giverny, until 1926 when he died of pneumosclerosis in his bedroom from which he could have overlooked the flower garden. Especially, most of these paintings were painted from when Monet was past the age of 70, until he was aged 86.
This painting is one of the 15 works in the Water Lilies series that Monet painted in 1908 at the age of 68, and together with 47 works from his other series, it was exhibited in a solo exhibition titled “Water Lilies. Water Landscape” at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in May of the following year (1909). In this painting, Monet minimized the difference of light and shade as much as possible, presenting delicate, exquisite colors and decorations like a rococo style, the method with which Monet had experimented occasionally from around 1906. Among an enormous number of the paintings in the series Water Lilies, this painting exhibits the lightest style.
Monet remarked about one of the reasons he was so fascinated by water lilies: his image of the water garden “evokes in you the idea of the infinite; you experience there, as in microcosm… the instability of the universe which transforms itself at every moment before our eyes.” As often indicated, the method of extracting a portion of the water surface and painting the close-up view of the portion can be considered a suggestive method of “using a part to represent the whole” as seen in the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It is no doubt that Monet learned a “perspective” and “representation” from ukiyo-e prints. This can be guessed from a collection of more than 200 ukiyo-e prints Monet had acquired which are hung on the walls of his house which is now the Claude Monet Museum.

Such a new development of his style into which Monet introduced an oriental aesthesis was variously criticized, but Monet refuted: “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” Another work created in the same year with almost the same composition and same color tones as this work is housed in the National Museum of Wales.