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OST - 81x100 - 1904
Monet's famous lily pond in his garden at Giverny provided the
subject matter for most of his major later works, paintings whose significance
in the development of modern art is now fully recognised. The theme of
waterlilies, that became not only Monet's most celebrated series of paintings,
but possibly one of the most iconic images of Impressionism, dominated the
artist's work over several decades, recording the changes in his style and his
constant pictorial innovations. The present example, which dates from 1904, is
a powerful testament to Monet's enduring vision and creativity in his mature
years.
By 1890, Monet had become financially successful enough
to buy the house with a large garden at Giverny, which he had rented since
1883. With great vigour and determination, he swiftly set about transforming
the gardens and creating a large pond, in which waterlilies gradually matured.
Once the garden was designed according to the artist's vision, it offered a
boundless source of inspiration, and provided the major themes that dominated
the last three decades of Monet's career. Towards the end of his life, he told
a visitor to his studio: 'It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I
planted them purely for pleasure; I grew them with no thought of painting them.
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 Stephan
Koja, Claude Monet (exhibition catalogue), Österreichische Galerie
Belvedere, Vienna, 1996, p. 146).
Once discovered, the subject of waterlilies offered a
wealth of inspiration that Monet went on to explore for several decades. His
carefully designed garden presented the artist with a micro-cosmos in which he
could observe and paint the changes in weather, season and time of day, as well
as the ever-changing colours and patterns. John House wrote: 'The water garden
in a sense bypassed Monet's long searches of earlier years for a suitable
subject to paint. Designed and constantly supervised by the artist himself, and
tended by several gardeners, it offered him a motif that was at the same time
natural and at his own command - nature re-designed by a temperament. Once
again Monet stressed that his real subject when he painted was the light and
weather' (J. House, Monet: Nature into Art, Newhaven, 1986, p. 31).
In the present work, Monet's primary interest is in
depicting the effects of light on the surface of the pond and on the
waterlilies themselves and the play of shadows and modulations of light that
the weather creates. Moving towards an increasingly abstract treatment of
space, Monet focused almost entirely on the water surface. He reduced the
horizon to a small patch of blue pigment in the upper left corner of the
composition, thus minimising the illusion of depth and perspective. The sky and
the trees, placed outside the scope of the canvas, are present through their
reflection in the water. The surface of the canvas thus becomes a
two-dimensional pattern, acquiring a spatial continuity in which all parts of
the composition are treated with equal importance. The elimination of the
horizon line led Monet towards a transition from the horizontal format to the
square canvases, that he started using in the year the present work was
executed.
In 1914, Monet began to conceive of his Grandes
décorations, a sequence of monumental paintings of the gardens that would take
his depictions of the waterlily pond in a dramatic new direction. The artist
envisaged an environment in which the viewer would be completely surrounded by
the paintings. He wrote: 'The temptation came to me to use this water-lily
theme for the decoration of a drawing room: carried along the length of the
walls, enveloping the entire interior with its unity, it would produce the
illusion of an endless whole, of a watery surface with no horizon and no shore;
nerves exhausted by work would relax there, following the restful example of
those still waters, [...] a refuge of peaceful meditation in the middle of a flowering
aquarium' (quoted in Claude Roger-Marx, 'Les Nymphéas de Monet', in Le Cri
de Paris, Paris, 23rd May 1909). In the later part of his career, it was
Monet's intention to depict atmosphere and colour rather than to record a
specific scene; working towards this goal, he reached a level of abstraction
that was to play a profound role on the development of later twentieth century
art.
