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Lot Essay
‘I have always loved sky and water, leaves and flowers. I found them in abundance in my little pool. ’——Claude Monet
Immersing the viewer in a shimmering aquatic world, Nymphéas occupies a pivotal position in the life and art of Claude Monet. Painted circa 1897-1899, this canvas is one of the earliest works to take as its subject the artist’s beloved water-lily pond at his home in Giverny. From this time onwards, this motif would dominate Monet’s art, serving as the inspiration for over two hundred canvases that he created until the end of his life. One of a small and rare series of just eight paintings, Nymphéas presents the defining artistic preoccupations of these iconic works—the complex, constantly shifting relationships between water, atmosphere and light that transformed the pond’s surface with each passing moment, providing endless creative inspiration (Wildenstein, nos. 1501-1508). Four of the eight water-lily paintings from 1897-1899 are housed in museums today, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Kagoshima City Museum of Art and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.
These inaugural Nymphéas also stand at the dawn of Monet’s investigations in the creation of a bold and ambitious ensemble of decorative paintings on the theme of the lily pond—a project that would ultimately come to fruition in the last years of his life with the mural-sized Grandes décorations. When the journalist Maurice Guillemot visited the artist in Giverny in August 1897, Monet granted him a rare tour of his water-lily pond, which he described as “an immobile mirror [on which] float water lilies, aquatic plants, unique species with broad spreading leaves and disquieting flowers of a strange exoticism.” “These are the models for a decoration,” Guillemot continued, “for which Monet has already begun to paint…large panels, which he showed me afterwards in his studio” (quoted in “Claude Monet,” La Revue illustrée, 15 March 1898, quoted in Monet in the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 19).
Monet then laid out for Guillemot his vision of an enclosed space lined with paintings that would transport the viewer into the realm of aesthetic reverie. “Imagine a circular room in which the dado beneath the moulding is covered with [paintings of] water, dotted with these plants to the very horizon, walls of transparency alternately green and mauve, the calm and silence of the still waters reflecting the opened blossoms. The tones are vague, deliciously nuanced with a dreamlike delicacy” (quoted in ibid., p. 19). The present Nymphéas may well have been one of the canvases that Guillemot admired in Monet’s studio in 1897, with which he was beginning to stake out this new and revolutionary pictorial territory.
The story of Monet’s now-legendary lily pond began in April 1883, when the artist moved to the village of Giverny with his future wife Alice Hoschedé and their combined eight children. Situated at the confluence of the river Seine and the Epte about forty miles northwest of Paris, Giverny was at that time a tranquil farming community of just three hundred residents. Upon their arrival there, the family rented a charming, large, pink stucco house called Le Pressoir, set upon two acres of land. When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet was quick to buy it, “certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,” as he wrote to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (quoted in P.H. Tucker, Monet: Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 175). It would remain his home for the rest of his life.
Immediately after purchasing Le Pressoir, Monet—an enthusiastic gardener since his youth—began an ambitious plan to redesign and replant the gardens that surrounded the house. He dug up the existing kitchen garden, known as Le Clos Normand, and planted a number of lush flower beds on the gentle slope in front of the house. Early in 1893, thanks to the increased income that sales of his paintings were making, Monet embarked on a second phase of his magnificent horticultural redesign. Perhaps inspired by the aquatic garden he had seen at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, he acquired an adjacent plot of land between the railroad tracks at the end of the garden and the river Ru, a tributary of the Epte, and immediately 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).
Though his application was met with resistance by local farmers who were worried that the exotic, foreign water plants that Monet wanted to grow would poison the water and destroy their cattle, permission was finally granted. By the autumn, he had converted nearly one thousand square meters into an aquatic wonderland—a lily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge and ringed by verdant arrangements of irises, agapanthus and rhododendrons, among many others, as well as bamboos, cherry trees and the weeping willows that would later become artistic subjects in their own right. “Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens,” Monet later proclaimed. “I do not deny that I am proud of them” (quoted in ibid., p. 179).
A keen and knowledgeable horticulturalist himself, Monet planted the traditional varieties of yellow and white water-lilies as well as sourcing new hybrid varieties from a specialist nursery run by the renowned botanist, Joseph Latour-Marliac based in Lot, south-west France. Monet recalled, “taking a catalogue [of the nursery’s water lilies] and choosing them to my heart’s content” (quoted in V. Russell, Monet’s Water Lilies, London, 1998, p. 42). A few years later, in 1901, Monet applied once again for permission to enlarge his pond, this time diverting a tributary of the Epte so that he could triple the size of his water garden. A few years later, he once more modified the pond, increasing it to the size that it remains, more or less unchanged, today.
Given the time, effort, enthusiasm—and money—that Monet put into the creation of his gardens, it is perhaps surprising that he did not begin work on his water-lily series straight away. Indeed, between 1893, when the construction of the pond commenced, and 1897, when the first water-lily canvases, such as Nymphéas, were observed in his studio by Guillemot, Monet painted only three depictions of his water garden, exploratory views looking across the pond toward the Japanese bridge (Wildenstein, nos. 1392 and 1419-1419a). Over the course of these years, Monet was immersed in his other series of paintings, and, understandably, he may have wanted the planting to grow and mature before he began committing his horticultural masterpiece to canvas.
It was not until 1897 that Monet lowered his gaze to the surface of the pond and began to paint the water lilies themselves, by then in full bloom. “It took me a long time to understand my water lilies,” he later recalled. “I had planted them for the pure pleasure of it, and I grew them without thinking 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 Claude Monet, exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1996, p. 146).
Monet was perhaps inspired to hone in on the surface of the water thanks to his preceding series of 1897, a group of twenty-one canvases titled Matinée sur la Seine. In these meditative landscape scenes, Monet captured a view of a Seine at dawn, fusing land, water and sky in a singular vision of soft light and delicate colour. Realising the aesthetic possibilities that a carefully demarcated body of water offered him, it is perhaps no surprise that Monet turned this same year to the surface of his pond as an artistic subject.
Nymphéas and the seven other paintings from this inaugural campaign are varied in format, size, colour and handling as Monet revelled in the myriad pictorial potentials of this novel motif. The present work has the most unified and subtle palette of the group, the still, silent plane of the water and the lily pads rendered in a harmonious range of iridescent blues, delicate violet and indigos, and the deeper greens and turquoises of the plants, with the two luminous white blossoms standing out in vivid counterpoint. While each of these works takes as its subject a closely cropped segment of the pond, the range of compositions preempts the endless formal experimentations that this motif inspired in Monet over the following decades.
In addition, the present work introduces one of the most important and radical aspects of Monet’s Nymphéas—the elimination of a perspectival viewpoint. His tightly focused scene plunges the viewer into the centre of the pond, removing all other peripheral detail to focus entirely on the harmonious world of colour, light and the reflections that move, in this case, imperceptibly across the inky water’s surface. “The sky and distance no longer appear except upside down,” Michel Butor has written, “and the water’s surface tilts toward the vertical, inducing a dream of flight or of diving” (quoted in Claude Monet: Late Work, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 13). These pictorial qualities would become central to every phase of Monet’s Nymphéas series and served as key influences on subsequent generations of artists throughout the twentieth century.
The cropped, flattened depiction of the water-lily pond also reflects Monet’s contemporaneous interest in Japanese prints, especially the woodblock prints of flowers by Katsushika Hokusai, several of which he owned in his collection. “Thank you for having thought of me for the Hokusai flowers,” he wrote to the dealer Maurice Joyant in 1896. “You don’t mention the poppies, and that is the important one for I already have the iris, the chrysanthemums, the peonies and the convolvulus” (quoted in A. Dumas, “Monet’s Early Years at Giverny,” in op. cit., exh. cat., 2016, p. 212). Monet’s close focus on the water-lilies themselves, against a flattened plane of blue, calls to mind these prints.
After he completed this pioneering group of paintings, Monet retreated almost immediately to a more conventional vantage point on the pond. In 1899-1900, he produced a sequence of eighteen views of the Japanese bridge that possess a stable geometric structure and traditional linear perspective (Wildenstein, nos. 1509-1520, 1628-1633). A few years later, in 1904, following the enormously successful exhibition of his paintings of London and his subsequent renovations to the pond, Monet again began to paint the dazzling and ever-changing plane of the water, and this remained almost his exclusive motif for the duration of his career.
Immersing the viewer in a shimmering aquatic world, Nymphéas occupies a pivotal position in the life and art of Claude Monet. Painted circa 1897-1899, this canvas is one of the earliest works to take as its subject the artist’s beloved water-lily pond at his home in Giverny. From this time onwards, this motif would dominate Monet’s art, serving as the inspiration for over two hundred canvases that he created until the end of his life. One of a small and rare series of just eight paintings, Nymphéas presents the defining artistic preoccupations of these iconic works—the complex, constantly shifting relationships between water, atmosphere and light that transformed the pond’s surface with each passing moment, providing endless creative inspiration (Wildenstein, nos. 1501-1508). Four of the eight water-lily paintings from 1897-1899 are housed in museums today, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Kagoshima City Museum of Art and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.
These inaugural Nymphéas also stand at the dawn of Monet’s investigations in the creation of a bold and ambitious ensemble of decorative paintings on the theme of the lily pond—a project that would ultimately come to fruition in the last years of his life with the mural-sized Grandes décorations. When the journalist Maurice Guillemot visited the artist in Giverny in August 1897, Monet granted him a rare tour of his water-lily pond, which he described as “an immobile mirror [on which] float water lilies, aquatic plants, unique species with broad spreading leaves and disquieting flowers of a strange exoticism.” “These are the models for a decoration,” Guillemot continued, “for which Monet has already begun to paint…large panels, which he showed me afterwards in his studio” (quoted in “Claude Monet,” La Revue illustrée, 15 March 1898, quoted in Monet in the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 19).
Monet then laid out for Guillemot his vision of an enclosed space lined with paintings that would transport the viewer into the realm of aesthetic reverie. “Imagine a circular room in which the dado beneath the moulding is covered with [paintings of] water, dotted with these plants to the very horizon, walls of transparency alternately green and mauve, the calm and silence of the still waters reflecting the opened blossoms. The tones are vague, deliciously nuanced with a dreamlike delicacy” (quoted in ibid., p. 19). The present Nymphéas may well have been one of the canvases that Guillemot admired in Monet’s studio in 1897, with which he was beginning to stake out this new and revolutionary pictorial territory.
The story of Monet’s now-legendary lily pond began in April 1883, when the artist moved to the village of Giverny with his future wife Alice Hoschedé and their combined eight children. Situated at the confluence of the river Seine and the Epte about forty miles northwest of Paris, Giverny was at that time a tranquil farming community of just three hundred residents. Upon their arrival there, the family rented a charming, large, pink stucco house called Le Pressoir, set upon two acres of land. When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet was quick to buy it, “certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,” as he wrote to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (quoted in P.H. Tucker, Monet: Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 175). It would remain his home for the rest of his life.
Immediately after purchasing Le Pressoir, Monet—an enthusiastic gardener since his youth—began an ambitious plan to redesign and replant the gardens that surrounded the house. He dug up the existing kitchen garden, known as Le Clos Normand, and planted a number of lush flower beds on the gentle slope in front of the house. Early in 1893, thanks to the increased income that sales of his paintings were making, Monet embarked on a second phase of his magnificent horticultural redesign. Perhaps inspired by the aquatic garden he had seen at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, he acquired an adjacent plot of land between the railroad tracks at the end of the garden and the river Ru, a tributary of the Epte, and immediately 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).
Though his application was met with resistance by local farmers who were worried that the exotic, foreign water plants that Monet wanted to grow would poison the water and destroy their cattle, permission was finally granted. By the autumn, he had converted nearly one thousand square meters into an aquatic wonderland—a lily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge and ringed by verdant arrangements of irises, agapanthus and rhododendrons, among many others, as well as bamboos, cherry trees and the weeping willows that would later become artistic subjects in their own right. “Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens,” Monet later proclaimed. “I do not deny that I am proud of them” (quoted in ibid., p. 179).
A keen and knowledgeable horticulturalist himself, Monet planted the traditional varieties of yellow and white water-lilies as well as sourcing new hybrid varieties from a specialist nursery run by the renowned botanist, Joseph Latour-Marliac based in Lot, south-west France. Monet recalled, “taking a catalogue [of the nursery’s water lilies] and choosing them to my heart’s content” (quoted in V. Russell, Monet’s Water Lilies, London, 1998, p. 42). A few years later, in 1901, Monet applied once again for permission to enlarge his pond, this time diverting a tributary of the Epte so that he could triple the size of his water garden. A few years later, he once more modified the pond, increasing it to the size that it remains, more or less unchanged, today.
Given the time, effort, enthusiasm—and money—that Monet put into the creation of his gardens, it is perhaps surprising that he did not begin work on his water-lily series straight away. Indeed, between 1893, when the construction of the pond commenced, and 1897, when the first water-lily canvases, such as Nymphéas, were observed in his studio by Guillemot, Monet painted only three depictions of his water garden, exploratory views looking across the pond toward the Japanese bridge (Wildenstein, nos. 1392 and 1419-1419a). Over the course of these years, Monet was immersed in his other series of paintings, and, understandably, he may have wanted the planting to grow and mature before he began committing his horticultural masterpiece to canvas.
It was not until 1897 that Monet lowered his gaze to the surface of the pond and began to paint the water lilies themselves, by then in full bloom. “It took me a long time to understand my water lilies,” he later recalled. “I had planted them for the pure pleasure of it, and I grew them without thinking 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 Claude Monet, exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1996, p. 146).
Monet was perhaps inspired to hone in on the surface of the water thanks to his preceding series of 1897, a group of twenty-one canvases titled Matinée sur la Seine. In these meditative landscape scenes, Monet captured a view of a Seine at dawn, fusing land, water and sky in a singular vision of soft light and delicate colour. Realising the aesthetic possibilities that a carefully demarcated body of water offered him, it is perhaps no surprise that Monet turned this same year to the surface of his pond as an artistic subject.
Nymphéas and the seven other paintings from this inaugural campaign are varied in format, size, colour and handling as Monet revelled in the myriad pictorial potentials of this novel motif. The present work has the most unified and subtle palette of the group, the still, silent plane of the water and the lily pads rendered in a harmonious range of iridescent blues, delicate violet and indigos, and the deeper greens and turquoises of the plants, with the two luminous white blossoms standing out in vivid counterpoint. While each of these works takes as its subject a closely cropped segment of the pond, the range of compositions preempts the endless formal experimentations that this motif inspired in Monet over the following decades.
In addition, the present work introduces one of the most important and radical aspects of Monet’s Nymphéas—the elimination of a perspectival viewpoint. His tightly focused scene plunges the viewer into the centre of the pond, removing all other peripheral detail to focus entirely on the harmonious world of colour, light and the reflections that move, in this case, imperceptibly across the inky water’s surface. “The sky and distance no longer appear except upside down,” Michel Butor has written, “and the water’s surface tilts toward the vertical, inducing a dream of flight or of diving” (quoted in Claude Monet: Late Work, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 13). These pictorial qualities would become central to every phase of Monet’s Nymphéas series and served as key influences on subsequent generations of artists throughout the twentieth century.
The cropped, flattened depiction of the water-lily pond also reflects Monet’s contemporaneous interest in Japanese prints, especially the woodblock prints of flowers by Katsushika Hokusai, several of which he owned in his collection. “Thank you for having thought of me for the Hokusai flowers,” he wrote to the dealer Maurice Joyant in 1896. “You don’t mention the poppies, and that is the important one for I already have the iris, the chrysanthemums, the peonies and the convolvulus” (quoted in A. Dumas, “Monet’s Early Years at Giverny,” in op. cit., exh. cat., 2016, p. 212). Monet’s close focus on the water-lilies themselves, against a flattened plane of blue, calls to mind these prints.
After he completed this pioneering group of paintings, Monet retreated almost immediately to a more conventional vantage point on the pond. In 1899-1900, he produced a sequence of eighteen views of the Japanese bridge that possess a stable geometric structure and traditional linear perspective (Wildenstein, nos. 1509-1520, 1628-1633). A few years later, in 1904, following the enormously successful exhibition of his paintings of London and his subsequent renovations to the pond, Monet again began to paint the dazzling and ever-changing plane of the water, and this remained almost his exclusive motif for the duration of his career.