Canto do Lago com Ninféias (Coin du Bassin aux Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Coleção Privada
OST - 131x88 - 1918
The famed lily pond at Monet’s garden at Giverny provided the subject matter for his most celebrated later canvases, including the resplendent Coin du bassin aux nymphéas from 1918.
The theme of waterlilies—which became not only Monet’s most celebrated series of paintings, but one of the most iconic images of the Impressionist movement—dominated the artist’s work over several decades, recording the changes in his style and his constant pictorial innovations. The present large-scale oil, which dates from 1918, is a powerful testament to Monet’s enduring vision and creativity in his mature years. This work and the related canvases in the series led to the celebrated Grandes Décorations (now in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris) which are now considered “the crowning glory of Monet’s career, in which all his work seemed to culminate”.
Three other canvases join the present work in this limited series featuring this specific corner of the artist’s water garden, opposite the Japanese bridge. Arguably the strongest and most luminous of the series, the present work is one of two works from this series in private hands, with W.1878 and W.1879 belonging to the collections of the Musée de Grenoble and Geneva’s Musée d'art et d'histoire, respectively. W.1881, the other painting in private hands, remained unsold in the artist’s lifetime and bears the estate stamp, while the present composition was signed and dated by the artist upon the sale of the work in early 1919.
The present work's surface is a testament to Monet's best canvases of the period. The artist's brushstrokes and thick application of pigment—in almost every color imaginable—yields an almost three-dimensional feeling to the lily pond and the complex flora behind it. The rich impasto found on this canvas speaks to the time and care Monet devoted to this particular work and distinguishes it from the other works in this limited series.
In Coin du bassin aux nymphéas, Monet juxtaposes the waterlilies floating on the lilypond’s surface with the reflections of the trees above. Together with the long fronds of the water grasses, the tendrils of weeping willow and boughs of rambling roses lend a truly dynamic sense of motion to the composition.
Moving towards an increasingly abstract treatment of space, the artist focused on the effect of light and shadow, using the surface of the water to reflect the wealth of color around it and blurring the boundary between the real and the refracted. By obscuring the horizon line, Monet virtually eliminates traditional perspective and instead builds an abbreviated sense of depth through the contrasting patterns and gestural brushwork in the foliage. The richly worked surface becomes a kaleidoscopic tapestry of color and light built upon the contrasts of the sinewy leaves and rounded blossoms.
By 1890, Monet had become financially successful enough to buy the house and large garden at Giverny, which he had rented since 1883. With enormous vigor 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”.
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 dramatic new directions. 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”.
This statement by Monet has often been used to ascribe the conception of his Grandes Décorations to the nineteen-teens. It seems, however, to have been a dream of the artist’s dating back to the 1890s, when his increasing focus on series pictures–such as his Haystacks, Rouen Cathedrals, Japanese Bridges and Mornings on the Seine–saw his creative process and approach to discrete works of art undergo a marked shift.
Daniel Wildenstein explored the artist’s earlier focus on a fully immersive environment of water imagery in his 1996 catalogue raisonné for the artist: “We know this from a letter addressed to G. Geffroy on 30 April 1914. Monet was impatient, having made a ‘false start’ due to ‘a deterioration in the weather; ‘I feel I am undertaking something very important. You will see some old attempts at what I have in mind, which I came across in the basement. Clemenceau has seen them and was bowled over. Anyway, you will see them soon, I hope.’ These lines put an end to all previous speculation on the origins of the Grand Decorations: it was chance, or at least a lucky foray in the storeroom, which resurrected the forgotten first attempts. These were almost certainly the canvases which M. Guillemot had mentioned in 1898. Seeing them again, Monet resolved to exorcise this long-standing temptation by undertaking a large-scale decorative ensemble. If we exempt the few old pictures found in his cellars, we can say with certainty the great work that Monet decided upon on the eve of war, and which was to occupy the remaining years of his life, was begun only in May 1914. As for Clemenceau’s often evoked intervention at this decisive moment–‘Go ahead and stop procrastinating,’ ‘you can still do it, so do it’–the letter to Geffroy clearly confirms Clemenceau’s role and his own account of it”.
Monet became so committed to his Grandes Décorations that he had an additional studio, massive in size, constructed on the Giverny property in 1915. This studio allowed him to move canvases by rope and lever as well as work straight through the winter months when weather prevented long painting sessions out of doors. In warmer temperatures, the artist would continue to station himself at various locations by his lily pond. Monet would work in the morning, returning again after lunch and painting until mid-afternoon, then pausing until the early evening. This schedule was not created due to his own personal predilections but rather to best capture the light and effects of his garden: “He adopted this schedule, not in order to accommodate his visitors nor because he had need of rest, but because the light on the pond was then changing and the lilies were closing up. Once the flowers were closed for the night, Monet would return to work in the evening light. Then the sunset would stain the water with streams of fire and gold, framed in the green reflections of the trees, and dotted with the pale or blueish islands of lily-pads. Once the flowers had closed, the water-lilies lost their fascination as a motif”.
J.C. N. Forestier, botanical correspondent for the review Fermes et Châteaux, wrote the following about Monet’s working methods in 1908: “In this mass of intertwined verdure and foliage… the lilies spread their round leaves and dot the water with a thousand red, pink, yellow and white flowers… The Master often comes here, where the bank of the pond is bordered with thick clumps of irises. His swift, short strokes place brushloads of luminous color as he moves from one place to another, according to the hour…. Monsieur Claude Monet paints not only the landscape, but the hour…. The canvas he visited this morning at dawn is not the same as the canvas we find him working on in the afternoon. In the morning, he records the blossoming of the flowers, and then, once they begin to close, he returns to the charms of the water itself and its shifting reflections, the dark water that trembles beneath the somnolent leaves of the water lilies”.
Monet’s 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 colors 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”.
Monet thus paid exacting attention to the details of the garden, including maintaining the pond and plants in a perfect state for painting. Elizabeth Murray writes, “The water gardener would row out in the pond in a small green flat-bottomed boat to clean the entire surface. Any moss, algae, or water grasses which grew from the bottom had to be pulled out. Monet insisted on clarity. Next the gardener would inspect the water lilies themselves. Any yellow leaves or spent blossoms were removed. If the plants had become dusty from vehicles passing by on the Chemin du Roy, the dirt road nearby, the gardener would take a bucket of water and rinse off the leaves and flowers, ensuring that the true colors and beauty would shine forth” .
These large-format canvases which Monet produced during the years of World War I were moved from the lily pond to the new, oversized studio. There Monet would place them next to each other in various combinations towards the goal of finalizing the design for his Grandes Décorations. According to George Shackelford and MaryAnne Stevens “The two-meter square panels were not, themselves, conceived as decorations. They were, on the other hand, the principal explorations of the pattern and color of water, flowers, leaves, trees, foliage, and reflections that served Monet in the elaboration of the three- four- and six-meter wide panels that he prepared for his donation to the state. Once again he used them to explore on a new scale effects that he had treated in the first years of the century…. Carted from the bank of the pond to the large studio, the panels could be placed side-by-side to build up the panoramic views Monet desired for the decorations. Thus, the study of water lilies seen through leaves [W. 1853, Musée d’Orsay, Paris] might have been placed in the studio to the right of one of the portrayals of the massive trunk of a willow so that Monet could transcribe the continuous view that they created on to a lengthy stretch of canvas, which would, in time, be installed as one of the Orangerie decorations”.
A protracted negotiation with Clemenceau over the official donation of Monet’s Grandes Décorations to the French state went on for years. Decisions about the permanent location of these works in Paris was discussed and changed multiple times and a purchase of Monet’s 1866 canvas Femmes au jardin, rejected from the salon of 1867, was required by Monet in order to assure the gift of these canvases. Femmes au jardin (W. 67), was first included in the collection of the Musée de Luxembourg before moving to the Louvre in 1934 and finally being transferred to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986, where it remains to this day. The Grandes Décorations, meanwhile, remained in the artist’s large studio until his death; in his last years he found himself unable to part with them. Some months after his passing, the works were moved from Giverny to Paris where each canvas was photographed in the Cours Visconti at the Musée du Louvre. They were then formally transferred to the Orangerie and mounted in two oval-shaped rooms, lit, as Monet specified, in as close a way to natural light as possible. There they remain today, where the composition on the second wall of the second room displays three combined canvas, together titled Le Matin aux Saules. It is in the leftmost portion that the willow tree and water lilies of the present composition are depicted again in a dazzling array of tonalities, light and shadow.
The Grandes Décorations, along with much of Monet’s late production, would influence artists throughout the following generations. The lasting legacy of Monet’s late work is most clearly seen in the art of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Sam Francis, whose bold color palette and rejection of figuration is foreshadowed by Monet’s Nymphéas. In recent years Gerhard Richter’s monumental abstract canvases, such as Cage 6 from 2006, have carried on the tradition established by his artistic forebears. As Jean-Dominique Rey writes: “Late Monet is a mirror in which the future can be read. The generation that, in about 1950, rediscovered it, also taught us how to see it for ourselves. And it was Monet who allowed us to recognize this generation. Osmosis occurred between them. The old man, mad about color, drunk with sensation, fighting with time so as to abolish it and place it in the space that sets it free, atomizing it into a sumptuous bouquet and creating a complete film of a ‘beyond painting,’ remains of consequential relevance today”.
Intent on bringing his masterpieces before the public from late 1918 and early 1919, Monet sold the present work to Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel, as well as the related canvas from the Coin du bassin series (W.1879) and two Weeping Willows (W.1868-69) solely to Bernheim-Jeune. This marked one of the first times the artist had parted with a group of new canvases since releasing his Venice works to the dealers in 1912. Widely exhibited from that time onward, Coin du bassin aux nymphéas most recently appeared in the acclaimed 2019 Monet: The Late Years show hosted by the Kimbell Art Museum and well as the 2020 Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. It comes to the market for the first time in nearly 25 years.
Vendida por USD 50,820,000 em leilão da Sotheby's.
