O Jardim do Getsêmani, Jerusalém, Israel (The Garden of Gethsemane) - Giorgio Vasari

O Jardim do Getsêmani, Jerusalém, Israel (The Garden of Gethsemane) - Giorgio Vasari
Jerusalém - Israel
The National Museum of Western Art, Tóquio, Japão
OST - 143x127 - Aproximadamente 1570

Entardecer de Verão na Itália, Itália (Summer Evening, Landscape in Italy) - Claude-Joseph Vernet

Entardecer de Verão na Itália, Itália (Summer Evening, Landscape in Italy) - Claude-Joseph Vernet
Itália
The National Museum of Western Art, Tóquio, Japão
OST - 89x133 - 1773

Joseph Vernet was a representative French eighteenth-century landscape painter. After returning home from twenty years in Italy, he furthered his reputation for landscapes, especially seascapes. The bathers at the riverside, seen here, are largely incidental to the main purpose of the piece, which is to depict an Italianate landscape, albeit an imaginary one. It is the evening of a summer's day. The painting is one of a series undertaken by the artist capturing scenes at different hours of a single day, following a tradition that went back to the seventeenth century.

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, Estados Unidos
OST - 66x104 - Entre 1897-1898

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Roma
OST - 81x100 - Entre 1890-1899

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Estados Unidos
OST - 81x100 - 1903

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Coleção Privada
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.

O Lago das Ninféias (Le Bassin des Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

O Lago das Ninféias (Le Bassin des Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Denver Art Museum, Denver, Estados Unidos
OST - 87x91 - 1904

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Estados Unidos
OST - 89x100 - 1905

Beginning in 1903, Monet embarked on a series of canvases depicting his water garden at Giverny. Here, the pads of lilies scattered across the painting suggest the water's surface, receding into space. The pattern of light and dark beneath the lilies indicates the reflection on the water-sky and the trees on a distant bank. Monet exhibited forty-eight of these "landscapes of water" in 1909. Fascinated by the artist's subtle fusion of reality and reflection, critics compared the paintings to poetry and music.

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
The Art Institute of Chicago, Estados Unidos
OST - 94x89 - 1906

“One instant, one aspect of nature contains it all,” said Claude Monet, referring to his late masterpieces, the water landscapes that he produced at his home in Giverny between 1897 and his death in 1926. These works replaced the varied contemporary subjects he had painted from the 1870s through the 1890s with a single, timeless motif—water lilies. The focal point of these paintings was the artist’s beloved flower garden, which featured a water garden and a smaller pond spanned by a Japanese footbridge. In his first water-lily series (1897–99), Monet painted the pond environment, with its plants, bridge, and trees neatly divided by a fixed horizon. Over time, the artist became less and less concerned with conventional pictorial space. By the time he painted Water Lilies, which comes from his third group of these works, he had dispensed with the horizon line altogether. In this spatially ambiguous canvas, the artist looked down, focusing solely on the surface of the pond, with its cluster of vegetation floating amid the reflection of sky and trees. Monet thus created the image of a horizontal surface on a vertical one.

Lagoa com Ninféias (Pond with Water Lilies) - Claude Monet

Lagoa com Ninféias (Pond with Water Lilies) - Claude Monet
Israel Museum, Jerusalém, Israel
OST - 101x72 - 1907

From his earliest years as a painter, Monet’s art was rooted in the direct and prolonged analysis of nature. Throughout his career, he grappled with the task of developing techniques adequate to translating his sensations in a way that preserved the veracity of his visual experience. During the second half of the nineteenth century, he traveled a great deal in search of appropriate motifs. Toward the end of the century, however, he found that the most enthralling subject was to be found literally in his own back yard. All that he required to fulfill his aesthetic needs was within the limits of his own property at Giverny. It was there that he undertook the last of his great series, The Water Lilies. Except for the London and Venice paintings, Monet’s water gardens became his exclusive preoccupation and theme. He was absorbed in his work on this series, the culmination of his artistic career, from the late nineties until his death in 1926.

Monet exhibited a fascination with the attributes of water early on in his artistic career. Depictions of the theme appeared already in the 1860s and became more frequent in the following decades. Through the painting of water Monet found a means of concretizing his lifelong preoccupation with light and the ephemeral aspects of nature.
During the 1890s, Monet renovated the garden at his home in Giverny, introducing improvements that allowed him to cultivate water lilies in a pond on his property. It was around this time that he embarked on the cycle of tranquil and contemplative waterscapes to which he would devote himself for the last thirty years of his life. The first series of these paintings, which had the pond as its main motif and included the Japanese footbridge that spanned it, was exhibited in 1900.

By 1903 Monet was concentrating almost exclusively on the pond and its reflections, focusing more and more on the water surface alone. These paintings were begun directly from nature, with large areas of tonal contrasts and color accents being painted on the spot. It is likely, however, that some of the actual work was done from memory in the studio later, a working procedure Monet had developed in his earlier series paintings. Often he worked with a number of paintings from the series around him, enhancing the unifying elements that would be important when the works hung together. The second exhibition, comprising forty-eight canvases painted between 1903 and 1908, was held in May 1909 at Durand-Ruel’s gallery. Monet supervised the sequence and the hanging of the works that were all shown together in one room.
Pond with Water Lilies is from this second series. It presents a section of the pond, omitting all of the surrounding landscape. The water extends to all four sides of the canvas, leaving only the foreshortened lily pads to orient the viewer. On the calm surface of the water, reflections of clouds, sky, and trees provide reference points outside the pond. True to the Impressionist credo of an unadulterated presentation of the visual, Monet makes no distinction between the ellusive reflections and concrete reality.

The culmination of this great series, to which Pond with Water Lilies belongs, was a group of mural-size paintings executed between 1914 and 1923, and eventually installed in a setting created especially for them in the Orangerie Museum in Paris.