Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Coleção Privada
OST - 89x99 - 1905
Although the garden was a favored subject for many of the
Impressionists, including Manet, Renoir, and Caillebotte, no artist rivaled
Monet in his dedication to the theme. Robert Herbert has written, "Of all
the Impressionists it was Monet who was chiefly responsible for elevating the
garden to the ranks of the most admired and influential paintings of the early
modern era" (Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, New Haven,
1988, p. 259), and Monet himself once told a journalist, "I perhaps owe it
to flowers for having become a painter" (quoted in P. Tucker, Claude
Monet, Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 178). The artist especially liked to
paint his own gardens, first at Argenteuil, then at Vétheuil, and finally at
Giverny, where the garden became his preeminent subject.
During the last two decades of his life, Monet devoted himself almost
single-mindedly to depicting the water garden that he had fashioned at Giverny,
producing an astonishingly complex series of more than two hundred canvases
that constitute some of the most novel and influential works of his entire
oeuvre. Paul Tucker has written about these paintings, "They stand as
eloquent witness to an aging artist's irrepressible urge to express his
feelings in front of nature and also attest to his persistent desire to
reinvent the look of landscape art and to leave a legacy of significance"
(Monet in the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998,
p. 14). The present canvas dates to a particularly creative and productive
period of work on the water-lily paintings (1905-1908) and forms part of a
subset of canvases that Tucker has called "the most classic of all the
views" (ibid., p. 148). It was featured in the inaugural exhibition of the
series at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1909, which established Monet beyond any
doubt as the most innovative landscape painter of the day: "Monet has
reached the final degree of abstraction and imagination allied to the real that
his art of the landscapist allows," the critic for Le Siècle declared
(quoted in ibid., p. 50).
Monet and his family moved to Giverny in April 1883. Situated at the confluence
of the Seine and the Epte about forty miles northwest of Paris, Giverny at the
time was a quiet, picturesque farming community of just 279 residents. Upon his
arrival there, Monet rented a large, pink stucco house on two acres of land.
When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet purchased it at the asking price
of 22,000 francs, "certain of never finding a better situation or more
beautiful countryside," as he wrote to Durand-Ruel (quoted in P.
Tucker, op. cit., 1995, p. 175). He immediately set to work tearing up the
existing kitchen garden and planting lush flower beds on the gentle slope in
front of the house. Monet had been an enthusiastic gardener all his life, and
at Giverny he finally enjoyed the means to fulfill this passion completely. He
employed as many as six gardeners, consulted with friends like Caillebotte and
Octave Mirbeau who shared his love of gardening, subscribed to horticultural
magazines and encyclopedias, imported rare plants and seeds from around the
world, and even received the advice of a Japanese gardener who traveled to
Giverny in 1891 at Monet's request. To a visitor to Giverny, Monet proclaimed,
"Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens... I do not deny
that I am proud of [them]" (quoted in ibid., p. 179). In 1910, when
the Epte flooded the gardens and threatened their ruin, Monet's grief was so
profound that his wife Alice confided to her daughter, "[He] does not
speak, but moans... [his] despair, like the Epte, will not abate" (quoted
in ibid., p. 199).
Early in 1893, three years after commencing work on the flower garden, Monet
acquired an adjacent plot of land between the railroad tracks and the river Ru.
Immediately thereafter, he applied to the local government for permission
"to install a prise d'eau to provide enough water to refresh the
pond that I am going to dig for the purpose of cultivating aquatic plants"
(quoted in ibid., p. 176). By autumn, he had converted nearly one thousand
square meters into a lavish lily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge and
ringed by an artful arrangement of flowers, trees, and bushes. Silent,
mysterious, and contemplative, the water garden formed an apt contrast to the
more traditional flower garden near the house, with its bold profusion of
brilliantly colored blossoms laid out in rectilinear beds. Although Monet created
the lily pond in part to fulfill his passion for gardening, he also intended it
as a source of artistic inspiration. In his petition to the Préfet de
l'Eure for clearance to build the pond, Monet specified that it would
serve "for the pleasure of the eyes and also for the purpose of having
subjects to paint" (quoted in Claude Monet: Late Work, exh. cat.,
Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 23). And this it did, quickly surpassing
the flower garden in Monet's hierarchy of subjects. Tucker has written, "That
Monet would have preferred the water garden over the flower garden is
understandable. It offered him the ultimate in variety: an infinite array of
color; constantly changing reflections; continual tensions between surface and
depth, near and far, stability and the unknown, with everything bathed in an
endlessly shifting but ever-present light. Filled with feeling yet distinctly
physical, it remained mysterious and deeply contemplative, much like the cosmos
as a whole" (op. cit., 1998, p. 41).
Monet did not begin work on his water-lily series immediately, however. He
later recalled, "It took me some time to understand my water lilies. 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 Claude
Monet, exh. cat., Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna, 1996, p. 146). Between 1893
and 1899, he made only ten images of the lily pond, possibly because he was
waiting for the plantings to mature. He may also have wanted to cement his
national stature by concentrating on subjects that were more distinctly French
(Rouen Cathedral, the Norman coast, the Seine) before turning to his own
horticultural fantasia. In 1899-1900, he painted a sequence of eighteen views
of the water garden, but these focus on the Japanese bridge that spans the
pond, lending the composition a stable geometric structure and traditional
linear perspective (Wildenstein, nos. 1509-1520). It was not until 1904,
following the enormously successful exhibition of his paintings from London,
that Monet began to treat the surface of the pond itself as a motif, and this
would remain almost his exclusive subject for the duration of his career. At
first, he still opted to anchor the viewer in space by including a narrow strip
of the far bank at the very upper margin of the canvas. Soon, however, he
eliminated even this last spatial indicator, yielding a dazzling and radically
destabilized vision of shifting surfaces and disintegrating forms. The world
beyond the surface of the pond now exists only as the most ephemeral
reflections.
Having established the basic compositional scheme for his water-lily series,
Monet began to work feverishly, completing more than sixty views of the pond
between 1905 and 1908, or about one every three weeks. The present painting
dates to the beginning of this enormously fertile period. He repeatedly
postponed the opening of the Nymphéas exhibition at Durand-Ruel,
"full of fire and confidence" (as he told the frustrated dealer) and
determined to keep working (quoted in P. Tucker, op. cit., 1998, p. 47).
Within the limitations that he had set for himself, Monet devised a dazzling
array of variations, altering the arrangement of the blossoms, increasing or
reducing the amount of reflected material, and exploring a wide range of
lighting effects. The present painting, for example, is part of an important
subset of canvases from 1905-1907, which are characterized by large,
horizontally striated islands of lilies, juxtaposed with undulating, vertical
reflections of trees and sky (Wildenstein, nos. 1671-1702). Conventional
spatial recession, indicated by the diminishing scale of the blossoms and lily
pads, is played against the flat surface of the canvas, which is emphasized by
vigorous, textural brushwork. The flowers themselves are rendered with the most
impasto to give them a sculptural presence, affirming their position on the top
of the pond, while in the watery areas, thin layers of color are laid one on
top of another to suggest the refractions of light and the changing hues in the
pond's depths. The paintings from 1907-1908, in contrast, largely focus on the
effect of a central stream of light that slices through floating clusters of
lilies and dense eddies of reflected foliage (Wildenstein, nos. 1703-1735).
Tucker has written, "What is clear about all these paintings is Monet's
utter resistance to duplication or to predictable results" (op. cit.,
1998, p. 45).
When the Nymphéas show finally opened at Durand-Ruel's gallery in May
1909, it was an unqualified success. Forty-eight views of the lily
pond--including the present painting--were featured, more than Monet had ever
exhibited from a single series. The critical response was overwhelmingly
positive. The Paris correspondent for Burlington Magazine, for instance,
proclaimed, "One has never seen anything like it. These studies of water
lilies and still water in every possible effect of light and at every hour of
the day are beautiful to a degree which one can hardly express without seeming
to exaggerate... There is no other living artist who could have given us these
marvelous effects of light and shadow, this glorious feast of color"
(quoted in P. Tucker, op. cit., 1995, p. 196). Another critic went so far
as to declare that the series ranked alongside Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
and Beethoven's last quartets. By the end of the year, nineteen of the
forty-eight paintings had been sold either to Durand-Ruel or to his rivals, the
Bernheim-Jeune brothers, netting Monet an extraordinary total of 272,000
francs. Durand-Ruel purchased the present example within weeks of the
exhibition's opening and sold it the following year to Charles B. Alexander, a
prominent New York lawyer and financier, and his wife Harriet Crocker, daughter
of the railroad magnate Charles Crocker.
Following the close of the exhibition in June 1909, there followed a period of
nearly five years in which Monet--exhausted from the intense months of work
leading up to the show, and then suffering from a sequence of personal
tragedies--barely took up his brushes. It was not until the spring of 1914 that
he returned to his beloved water garden in earnest; in late June, he reported
to Durand-Ruel, "I have thrown myself back into work, and when I do that,
I do it seriously, so much so that I am getting up at four a.m. and am grinding
away all day long (quoted in ibid., p. 204). Although Monet completed well
over a hundred paintings of the lily pond over the course of the next twelve
years, he opted neither to exhibit nor to sell them, and the majority remained
in his studio at the time of his death in December 1926. The culmination of the
series and the most ambitious undertaking of the artist's entire career was
the Grandes Décorations, an ensemble of twenty-two mural-sized canvases
totaling more than ninety meters in length, which Monet completed just months
before his death and donated to the French state. The Musée de l'Orangerie,
newly remodeled to house the magnificent bequest, opened in May 1927--eighteen
years almost to the day since the results of Monet's remarkable achievement in
his water garden had last been seen publicly at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. Vendida por USD 43,762,500 em leilão da Christie’s em 2012.
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