Claude Monet | Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies | The Met Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies Artist: Claude Monet (French, Paris 1840–1926 Giverny) Date: 36 1/2 x 29 in. (92.7 x 73.7 cm) Classification: H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 Accession Number: 29.100.113 On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 819 In 1893, Monet, a passionate horticulturist, purchased land with a pond near his property in Giverny, intending to build something "for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint." The result was his water-lily garden. In 1899, he began a series of eighteen views of the wooden footbridge over the pond, completing twelve paintings, including the present one, that summer. The vertical format of the picture, unusual in this series, gives prominence to the water lilies and their reflections on the pond.

Catalogue Entry "A landscape does not get under your skin in one day. And then all of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was. I took up my palette. Since then I’ve hardly had any other subject," Claude Monet told Marc Elder in 1924. Thirty-one years earlier, in 1893, the painter bought a small piece of land across the railroad tracks from his property at Giverny that included a small pond formed by water from the Ru stream, a diversion of the Epte river (a tributary of the Seine). His intention was to construct something "for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint" (quoted in Tucker 1990, p. 255). He installed a Japanese-style footbridge over the pond late that year following the same axis as his main garden path and first painted the motif in three canvases of 1895 before planting water lilies (see Additional Images, figs. 1, 2).

Monet returned in a concerted way to depict the bridge over his pond in eighteen canvases of 1899–1900 and exhibited twelve of them all with similar titles at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in 1900. He had spent the warm-weather months of 1899 devoted to the series, as his letters of that summer attest. In The Met’s canvas, the bridge is front and center, much larger than the bridge of his first forays into the subject. In 1901, after this initial series, he purchased more of the marshy land adjacent to the pond and enlarged it by diverting water from the stream. He also added a framework to the bridge for wisteria and planted bamboo, Japanese apple and cherry trees as well as rhododendrons, in addition to the large willow and poplar trees that were already there. The painter returned to the motif after modifying the pond again, with a second series created between 1903 and 1908 and exhibited in 1909.

After a final enlargement of the water garden due to flooding in 1910, he undertook a third group in the years during and after the First World War, comprising the large decorations for the two oval rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. The Picture: The Met’s 1899 picture is similar in composition and colors to two others of that year in the National Gallery, London, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (see Additional Images, figs. 3, 4); other examples from his 1899 series include paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; National Gallery, London; Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, Cairo; and private collections. Whereas these paintings retain an illusion of recession of the pond into depth (despite the extremely minimal remaining patch of sky), later efforts moved toward a flatter abstraction of the water surface itself that became influential decades later to the generation of Abstract Expressionist artists. In all, Monet painted at least one hundred images of his waterlily pool over a period of more than twenty years.

His first series came soon after another contemplative series, Mornings on the Seine (1897) (see, for example, The Met, 56.135.4 ), where he attended to the particular qualities of morning light reflected on the water. In the present work, the surrounding features of the landscape have been left by the wayside to focus on the bridge itself and the water lilies below. While most of the paintings in the series have a nearly square format, The Met’s picture is one of two in vertical format, which here allows for a greater relationship between the flora of the earth and water, giving slightly more prominence to the lilies. The Met’s work distinctively lacks the tuft of irises that flanks the bridge at left in all of the other examples of that year. While there were actually seven supporting bars that upheld the ramp of the bridge, only four of them are visible in The Met’s painting and either four or five in the other versions that year. The strong rhythm of the four vertical bars punctuating the bridge mid-air contrasts with the water lilies that seem to expand horizontally beyond the picture plane.

At the same time, there is a palpable tension between the illusions both of recession into depth and of the reflective, translucent quality of the water in comparison with the thick dabs of yellow, light pink, white, and green paint that make up the water lilies and seem to sit on the two-dimensional surface of the painting. The deep red curved form at the bottom of the painting representing the bridge’s shadow also figures in this two- versus three-dimensional interplay. Monet had a team of outdoor workers helping him to maintain his gardens at Giverny. Gardening was so important to him that "had he not been a painter, he probably would have been a botanist" (Tucker 1990, p. 255). He was receiving all sorts of advice from French gardening experts, subscribing to horticultural magazines, and ordering exotic plants from far-off locales. The year before undertaking The Met’s painting, the critic Guillemot (quoted in Tucker 1990, p.

255) remarked that Monet read more catalogues and horticultural price lists "than articles by aesthetes." Monet focused so intensely on the water lilies that when guests arrived in late afternoon, he would rush them over to the pond to see the lilies before they closed at five o’clock (Vauxcelles 1905). It has been noted (Wildenstein 1985) that, most likely, he painted the entire series from a makeshift studio always placed at the same vantage point at the outlet of his water basin. The art critic Arsène Alexandre (1901) noted it sat in the marsh "like a tent and an observatory" (see Additional Images, fig. 5). Monet also may have used a rowboat that visitors recalled having seen moored to the bridge to sit in and paint the bridge with a head-on view. He retouched the works as a group before exhibiting them, stressing links of color and form among them. While most of the canvases from 1899 have greenish tonalities, those from 1900 integrate warmer colors into the greens.

Japonisme: Local residents called his water garden the "Japanese garden" and Japanese visitors saw similarities to Japanese gardens, yet, according to Maurice Kahn (Kahn 1904), Monet claimed he had not had the idea of creating a Japanese garden in mind when constructing it. The Japanese gardens Monet might have seen on view at the Universal Exposition in 1889 were very different, too (see Seiberling 1976). Still, Monet certainly knew and collected Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints with images of bridges. He had been collecting Japanese prints since the 1860s. At the end of the nineteenth century in Paris, all things Japanese were very much in vogue, particularly among the arts, so much so that Jules Claretie coined the term "japonisme" in 1872 to describe the phenomenon. While Monet never visited Japan, he learned of its culture through its art and believed, as did many Europeans of the time, that Japanese culture was artistic and that Japanese people had refined artistic tastes (Spate and Bromfield 2001, p. 4).

The very notion of creating serial paintings, it has been suggested (Spate and Bromfield 2001, pp. 8, 36), may have come to the painter from such Japanese landscape print series as Katsushika Hokusai’s famous Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji; Monet owned nine prints from the series, and three volumes of Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji numbered among a long list of books and articles on Japanese art and culture that filled his library (see list in Monet and Japan 2001, p. 213). A bridge depicted in Monet’s Japanese print collection, such as Utagawa Hiroshige’s Monkey Bridge, Kai Province (1853), probably inspired him to build his own (Dumas 2015, p. 215). Hiroshige created several images of Japanese bridges surrounded by nature (e.g., see Additional Images, fig. 6), even including the wisteria that Monet would add later to his bridge in abundance. The Japanese woodblock artist tended to place his bridges to one side, though, where Monet’s was placed more squarely head-on in the present and concurrent canvases.

Viewers still saw a connection, though, at the exhibition in 1900, where his work was received favorably. When talking about his bridge paintings, Monet spoke of "peaceful meditation" and the Japanese idea of evoking "the whole by means of a fragment"; he said he had "no other wish than to mingle more closely with nature" (quoted in Mühlberger 1993). His notions of inner peace reached through a study of nature melded with his japonisme; he planted flowers he saw in Japanese prints, such as Hiroshige’s wisteria, and even painted his dining room in yellows that had been used by his favorite Japanese artists Hiroshige and Hokusai and mounted his Japanese print collection against those tones (see Additional Images, fig. 7). Later, Monet commented of Japanese woodblock prints to the Duke of Treviso, "what we appreciated above all in the West was the bold fashion of designing their subjects: those people [Japanese artists] have taught us to compose differently, there is no doubt about that" (quoted in Guitton 2014).

His flattening of the picture plane with the motif of the bridge in The Met’s version and others, as well as his tightly cropped and contained view, display a compositional debt to Hiroshige and Hokusai (see, for example, Hiroshige’s Rain Shower above the Great Bridge at Atake [1857] and Inside Kameido Tenjin Shrine [1856] from his series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo as well as Hokusai’s Under Mannen Bridge at Fukagawa [1830–31, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji]). The design of Monet’s Eastern-inspired water garden contrasted with that of his flower garden, which was more traditionally Western in conception and evokes eighteenth-century formal country-house garden designs with strong geometric plans. The lily pond’s inclusion of the bridge, bamboo, gingko trees, and Japanese fruit trees on its banks recalls Asian precedents. Just as they commingled with Western plantings, Japanese cherry, apple, and maple trees as well as Oriental poppies and Japanese anemones took root in the flower garden (see Tucker 1990, p. 256).

Monet and the New Botany: Monet could have learned of Japanese gardens from a variety of sources: recent publications on the topic, such as Gustave Geffroy’s article on Japanese landscapists and their gardens in Siegfried Bing’s Le Japon artistique in December 1890; his friends, patron Tadamasa Hayashi and journalist, author, and art critic Théodore Duret; the horticultural exhibition at the Universal Exhibition of 1889; and a Japanese garden near Versailles built by Hugues Krafft in 1885. Hayashi was a frequent visitor to Giverny and owner of two Monet paintings for which he may have traded Japanese prints; he also may have taught Monet about the religious significance of Japanese gardens. Duret had visited the gardens of the summer palace of Hamagoten in Edo and could report back.

Monet may have seen photographs of gardens in Japan, Japanese screens with images of gardens, and a Japanese garden first-hand at the horticultural exhibition of 1889 or at Versailles, where Krafft built his 1885 Japanese garden Midori no Sato ("Hill of Verdant Greenery") with a waterlily pool and a red lacquer bridge following a trip to Japan. Finally, a letter from Monet to fellow painter Paul Helleu of June 9, 1891, makes reference to the expected visit of his Japanese gardener, so influences of Japanese-style gardening at Giverny may have been very direct (Wildenstein 1974 [1979]; for all of these possible sources, see Spate and Bromfield 2001, p. 46). Monet kept abreast of what could be called the "new botany" of the period, following the new hybrid creations of French growers Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac and Antoine Lagrange.

While scholars often have discussed Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem "Le Nénuphar blanc" (1885) as the source for Monet’s interest in water lilies, Monet’s choice of flower, nymphéas (nymphaea), was cultivated by Latour-Marliac through a hybrid of hardier American with African and other types, not Mallarmé’s common wild nénuphars (Willsdon 2004, p. 211). In fact, the reddish tones of Monet’s 1900 series relate to the red undersides of the leaves of Latour-Marliac’s new scented hybrid water lilies. On display in a stream at the 1889 Universal Exhibition as if they were growing wild, Latour-Marliac’s water lilies completely covered the surface, as they would in Monet’s pond until the painter enlarged it in 1901 (see Additional Images, fig. 8). Monet was another exhibitor at the 1889 Universal Exposition, so it is most likely that he saw the stream display there, which won first prize.

(The grower’s water lilies won a gold medal at the 1900 Universal Exposition, where Lagrange displayed his water lilies as well.) Monet ordered small amounts of these expensive varieties from Latour-Marliac in 1894 and 1904, as well as other colorful varieties from Lagrange (Bocquillon 2009 and Willsdon 2015, p. 40). He may have also seen colorplates of the yellow, pale pink, and red new varieties of water lilies that were included in horticultural magazines and books from the 1880s on (see Holmes 2012). Another source for the idea of growing his water lilies in a wild fashion, instead of the more traditional Victorian style of growing them in rows, was William Robinson’s The Wild Garden, a popular British gardening book published in 1870 Monet may have encountered on his stay in London that year during the Franco-Prussian War or later when it found a following in France (see Willsdon 2004, pp. 138, 220, 264 n.

25, 272 n. 101, who notes that Robinson had been one of the first to publicize Latour-Marliac’s new water lilies, dedicating the 1893 volume of his journal The Garden to the French grower and including in it an article on the new water lilies [see Willsdon 2015, pp. 45, 314 n. 74]). The Garden as Refuge: The critic Arsène Alexandre visited Giverny in 1901 and described Monet’s ease and good will in his newly constructed natural floral surroundings, as opposed to the artist’s city guise, which was "cold, laconic, and sarcastic" (Alexandre 1901). The psychologically transformative aspect of Monet’s water garden was one of which the artist was proud; he chose to share the experience of his garden with passersby, according to Alexandre.

Indeed, two scholars have reckoned that the artist had sought—at the time of the Dreyfus Affair—to create a Utopian "healing dream state" for France through both his water garden and his paintings of it (see Tucker 1990 and Willsdon 2004; quote from Willsdon, who notes of the scented water lilies the healing power of synaesthetic experience, pp. 220–21). That political conflict ripped at the core of the French nation from 1894, the date of Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction of treason, until 1906, the year of Dreyfus’s exoneration. The split of the French people between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards was at its height in 1899, the year of Dreyfus’s return to France for a new trial, conviction, and pardon, and the year of The Met’s painting.

Alexandre’s description of Monet’s water garden revels in its beauty: "Damascened full round leaves of water lilies, encrusted with precious stones that are their flowers, this water seems, when the sun is played on its surface, the masterpiece of a goldsmith who would combine the most magical metal alloys." Such poetic portrayals of the water garden abounded at the turn of the century alongside nationalistic rhetoric about it. This conjunction may seem odd for an image of a pond and its overarching bridge, but the artist’s retreat to nature, which began in earnest once at Giverny in the nineties, has been seen by some to have resonance beyond the personal realm to the political body of France. Monet was encouraged to expand his repertoire of subjects after his critical acclaim at the exhibitions of 1898 and 1899, according to Tucker (1990, p. 260). The contemporary critic Raymond Bouyer, for example, wrote that Monet’s work "expresses France" and called him "our great national painter" and "the most significant painter of the century" (quoted in Tucker 1990, p.

260); such high praise emboldened Monet to seek beyond the Western motifs in his garden, even painting the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge, and other monuments of London (where he spent parts of the winters of 1899–1901), as well as his Japanese-inspired footbridge. Monet was also seeking refuge at the pond from a number of irritants, from his ever-increasing age and frailty, to the bustling modern cities of Paris and London, to France’s torn state in the height of the Dreyfus Affair. It has been noted that the painter withdrew to paint his "self-styled Eden," just as he had painted the garden in Argenteuil in the seventies in reaction to the industrial and commercial developments that surrounded him in a formerly "idyllic" town. And, as in his garden pictures of Argenteuil, Monet contained the view, closing off both background and sides, so there is no choice for the viewer but to give in to nature’s jewels (see Tucker 1990, p. 261; Tucker 1998, p. 23).

Unlike this compositional containment, the return to the fundamentals of an Impressionist technique in the series of 1899 has been seen as a "clarion call for France to reexamine her building blocks, to encourage an honest accounting, and to start anew," rather than a retreat (Tucker 1998, p. 26). It has been argued that Monet used the association with the East to show France could find important guidance at that critical moment from Japan, taking from the Japanese deep engagement with nature and its aesthetically-minded people new ideas for the French nation (Tucker 1990, p. 264). The critics’ reaction to Monet’s new Eastern motif sometimes invoked patriotic sentiment. While some may have wondered with trepidation what it could mean for the artist’s reputation as a singularly French artist to resort to foreign influence, the Impressionist defender Julien Leclercq felt that Monet had surpassed the Japanese with this series.

Leclercq (1900) summarized his support of Monet’s new images of his Japanese footbridge in the face of any possible xenophobic criticism: "to discredit [the series] is to discredit France." His exhibition of the footbridge paintings in 1900 directly followed his strong representation at the Universal Exposition of that year (Tucker 1990, p. 266). The quick shift in motifs, however, between his Universal Exposition contributions and the present series on view three weeks later actually brought forth mixed reviews and some puzzlement. But select critics like Leclercq guided the public toward a broader vision of the artist as still particularly French in his exploration of nature in art. Monet would pursue his images of Giverny for another two decades, producing five hundred pictures in all of his precious gardens, whether simply as further explorations of the garden theme he had pursued for decades, as near-at-hand balms for his own aging, or as sources of strength for his troubled world from the Dreyfus Affair through the First World War. [Jane R.

Becker 2015] Claude Monet Giverny Paintings | HowStuffWorks Claude Monet Giverny Paintings Claude Monet painted Waterlilies, night effect from 1897 to 1898, studying his subject patience. See more pictures of Monet's paintings . In the spring of 1883, Claude Monet decided it was time to find a permanent residence for his family and he selected the village of Giverny. It was small and relatively untouched by industry, and the region had a picturesque appeal. Gentle rolling hills rose to the north, while to the south there were cultivated fields of wheat and poppies as well as meadows covered with wildflowers and irises . Monet found a large house to rent on the southern outskirts of the village. He signed a long-term lease and transported the family's belongings by river to Giverny in his studio boat. By June, Monet and his family were settled in their new home. Late in the year, he resumed his travels, but it was evident wherever he went he now missed his home as well as his family.

In February 1884, he wrote to Alice from Bordighera: "If I am happy to work in this beautiful area, my heart is always at Giverny." Up Next Monet Image Gallery Monet's passion for gardening dated back to his young married life in Argenteuil. He found the work relaxing, and he often claimed he grew flowers to always have a natural subject to paint. Monet spent most of his summers in Giverny, setting up his easel in the surrounding fields of crops and flowers and then tending the garden at his leisure. By 1890, Monet was able to purchase the house, and he undertook a far more extensive renovation of his garden. With its array of natural colors that changed from the cool blues and violets and pale yellows of spring irises to the hot oranges and reds of the late summer dahlias , the garden was composed the way Monet composed his paintings, allowing the natural visual sensations to guide his aesthetic expression. Monet purchased an additional parcel of land adjacent to his property in February 1893. Located near a small branch off the Epte River, it had a pond in the center surrounded by marshlands.

The following summer Monet added water lilies to the pond's surface, and, in 1895, he had a small arched Japanese bridge built to span the western end of the pond. As with his flower garden, he patiently watched his water garden transform and mature. Around 1897, Monet painted a small set of studies of the pale lilies floating on the dark water. Feeling he had not captured the effect he desired, Monet tried again in July 1899. Over the course of the summer, he worked on 12 canvases, each depicting a view of his pond looking westward toward the Japanese bridge. Monet returned to Giverny in April 1890 and put the finishing touches on the remaining canvases as he waited for the warm weather. Over the summer, he painted six more views of the Japanese bridge. In place of the crisp, scintillating touch of the paintings of the previous year, he now handled his brush with more freedom and confidence. The cool, pear-like tonality of the paintings of 1899 was now enriched with the warmth of red and violet hues.

Monet was an artist who was passionate about cultivating and painting the beauty around him. To learn more about his flower and water garden works, see Claude Monet's paintings from Giverny: The Artist's Garden at Giverny : Claude Monet's The Artist's Garden at Giverny shows Monet's passion for blue and violet flowers. Learn about The Artist's Garden at Giverny, a painting done with short, thick strokes of pure pigment. Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny : For Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny, Claude Monet roamed the rolling hills of the village. Learn about Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny, a lush display of natural color. Woman with an Umbrella turned towards the right : In Woman with an Umbrella turned towards the right, Claude Monet returned to painting figures. Learn about Woman with an Umbrella turned towards the right, which features Suzanne Hoschedé. Springtime (Le Printemps) : Springtime (Le Printemps) depicts Claude Monet's content with domestic life. Learn about Springtime (Le Printemps), a painting of Monet's children beneath a flowering fruit tree.

Bend in the Epte River near Giverny : This Claude Monet painting celebrates the rare sight of poplar trees in full flower. Learn about Bend in the Epte River near Giverny, which highlights Monet's love of natural spectacle. Waterlilies, night effect : Waterlilies, night effect showcases the patience of Claude Monet as artist and gardener. Learn about Waterlilies, night effect, Monet's first series of water garden works. The Boat at Giverny : The Boat at Giverny is one of many pieces Claude Monet painted at the river. Learn about The Boat at Giverny, which features Alice Hoschedé's daughters in Monet's rowboat. Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies : Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies represents an intense period of work for Claude Monet. Learn about Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, a serene view from Monet's water garden pond. The Waterlily Pond, Harmony in Pink : The Waterlily Pond, Harmony in Pink reveals Claude Monet's looser, more descriptive brush stroke.

Learn about The Waterlily Pond, Harmony in Pink, a painting of lush violet, rose, and green. Water Lily Pool : Claude Monet's Water Lily Pool is from a series of paintings that received lukewarm reviews from the critics. Learn about Water Lily Pool, which was exhibited at Paris's Durand-Ruel's gallery in November of 1900. Waterlily Pond : Claude Monet's Waterlily Pond was painted over the summers of 1904 and 1905. Learn about Waterlily Pond, a water garden series where Monet took a different vantage point. Garden in Giverny : Garden in Giverny shows Claude Monet's meticulous attention to the flowers lining his front walk. Learn about Garden in Giverny, a scene of rosy nasturtiums and dahlias. Flowering Arches, Giverny : Claude Monet's Flowering Arches depicts the artist's garden as serene sanctuary. Learn about Flowering Arches, a pond view of trellis-climbing roses.

To see the blue and violet iris beds that floated like a haze around Claude Monet's estate, continue to The Artist's Garden at Giverny in the next section. For more about art, famous artists, and art history, check out: Claude Monet's garden at Giverny for your next Stay in Paris ! The Two Gardens There are two parts in Monet's garden: a flower garden called Clos Normand in front of the house and a Japanese inspired water garden on the other side of the road. The two parts of Monet's garden contrast and complement one another. Claude Monet's Home and Garden in Giverny in Spring - Giverny Photo by Ariane Cauderlie r The Clos Normand When Monet and his family settled in Giverny in 1883 the piece of land sloping gently down from the house to the road was planted with an orchard and enclosed by high stone walls. A central alley bordered with pines separated it into two parts. Monet had the pines cut down, keeping only the two yews closest to the house to please Alice.

From this Clos Normand of about one hectare, Monet made a garden full of perspectives, symmetries and colours. The land is divided into flowerbeds where flower clumps of different heights create volume. Fruit trees or ornamental trees dominate the climbing roses, the long -stemmed hollyhocks and the coloured banks of annuals. Monet mixed the simplest flowers (daisies and poppies) with the most rare varieties. The central alley is covered over by iron arches on which climbing roses grow. Other rose trees cover the balustrade along the house. At the end of the summer nasturtiums invade the soil in the central alley. Claude Monet did not like organized nor constrained gardens. He married flowers according to their colours and left them to grow rather freely. With the passing years he developed a passion for botany, exchanging plants with his friends Clemenceau and Caillebotte. Always on the look-out for rare varieties, he bought young plants at great expense. "All my money goes into my garden," he said.

But also: "I am in raptures." Giverny Claude Monet's Garden Main Alley late summer - Photo Ariane Cauderlier Claude Monet Water Lily Pond in Giverny - Photo Ariane Cauderlier The water garden In 1893, ten years after his arrival at Giverny, Monet bought the piece of land neighbouring his property on the other side of the railway. It was crossed by a small brook, the Ru, which is a diversion of the Epte, a tributary of the Seine River. With the support of the prefecture, Monet had the first small pond dug ; even though his peasant neighbours were opposed. They were afraid that his strange plants would poison the water. Later on the pond would be enlarged to its present day size. The water garden is full of asymmetries and curves. It is inspired by the Japanese gardens that Monet knew from the prints he collected avidly. In this water garden you will find the famous Japanese bridge covered with wisterias, other smaller bridges, weeping willows, a bamboo wood and above all the famous nympheas which bloom all summer long.

The pond and the surrounding vegetation form an enclosure separated from the surrounding countryside. Never before had a painter so shaped his subjects in nature before painting them. And so he created his works twice. Monet would find his inspiration in this water garden for more than twenty years. After the Japanese bridge series, he would devote himself to the giant decorations of the Orangerie. Always looking for mist and transparencies, Monet would dedicate himself less to flowers than to reflections in water, a kind of inverted world transfigured by the liquid element. Claude Monet Water Garden in Giverny, Autumn Reflections - Photo Ariane Cauderlier Wartime water lilies: how Monet created his garden at Giverny | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts Sign in Claude Monet, Water Lilies (detail), 1916 – 26. Oil on canvas. 200 x 426.1 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. The Steinberg Charitable Fund, inv. 134:1956 Photo © Saint Louis Art Museum Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Wartime water lilies: how Monet created his garden at Giverny Wartime water lilies: how Monet created his garden at Giverny By Ann Dumas Published 12 November 2015 Curator Ann Dumas sets the scene for our major exhibition of garden painters, revealing how Monet’s passion for plants pushed the boundaries of his art. From the Winter 2015 issue of RA Magazine , issued quarterly to Friends of the RA . Monet’s monumental canvases of his water garden painted in the last decade of his life – the Grandes Décorations (1914–26) – are the ultimate expression of the symbiosis between his garden and his art. They would seem to offer a retreat into a world of tranquil beauty, an aesthetic immersion in the garden that obsessed him for the last 30 or so years of his life. Yet, for Monet these works carried another layer of meaning, beyond the garden. They were his very personal response to the mass tragedy of the First World War. “Yesterday I resumed work,” he wrote on 1 December 1914. “It’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times.

All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and colour while so many people are suffering and dying for us.” Monet was acutely aware of the war. The peace of his garden was sometimes shattered by the sound of gunfire from the battlefields only 50 kilometres away. His stepson was fighting at the front and his own son Michel was called up in 1915. Many of the inhabitants of Giverny fled to safety but Monet stayed behind: “…if those savages must kill me, it will be in the middle of my canvases, in front of all my life’s work.” Painting was what he did and he saw it, in a way, as his patriotic contribution. A group of paintings of the weeping willow (Water Lilies with Weeping Willows, 1916–19; pictured below), a traditional symbol of mourning, was Monet’s most immediate response to the war, the tree’s long, sweeping branches hanging over the water, an eloquent expression of grief and loss.

Video Claude Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych Curator Ann Dumas introduces the Agapanthus Triptych, three vast paintings that have been reunited at the Royal Academy as the grand finale of ‘Painting the Modern Garden’. Aside from painting and gardening I’m good for nothing. Claude Monet, 1904 On 12 November 1918, a day after the armistice, Monet wrote to his close friend, the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, proposing to give two works from his Grandes Décorations to the nation “to honour the victory and peace”. Plans were then drawn up to house 12 large panels in a specially constructed pavilion in the grounds of the Hôtel Biron in Paris that was to become the Musée Rodin. In 1921, however, the scheme was abandoned for financial reasons, and it was not until May 1927, a few months after Monet’s death, that the great water lily cycle opened to the public in two large oval rooms in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, where they can be seen today.

Three of the most beautiful panels from the original scheme, the so-called Agapanthus triptych, including Water Lilies (1916-26; pictured), did not, however, appear in the Orangerie display and were eventually sold separately to three American museums – the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Exceptionally, these institutions have allowed these great works to be reunited at the Academy as the grand finale of Painting the Modern Garden . Claude Monet, Water Lilies with Weeping Willows, 1916 – 19. Oil on canvas. 160 x 180 cm. Lycée Claude Monet, Paris Photo © Lycée Claude Monet, Paris. Photography: Jean-Charles Louiset Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Painting and gardening were the twin passions that shaped Monet’s life.

In one of his earliest paintings, Spring Flowers (1864; pictured), over ten species of sumptuously painted flowers, fresh from the garden, reveal not only a brilliant painter at the start of his career but also a precocious botanist. Lady in the Garden (1867; pictured), a view of his aunt’s garden at Sainte-Adresse on the Normandy coast, had strong personal associations for Monet because it was here that he learned about gardening in his youth. Its corbeille, or raised bed planted in a single, vivid colour, is typical of the formal planting that was popular in French gardens in the mid-19th century. At this time, gardening was emerging as the widespread, popular pastime that it remains today. Plant nurseries, catalogues, floral displays in department stores, fairs and exhibitions provided the burgeoning bourgeoisie with the opportunity to create their own private Eden in an increasingly industrial age. Scientific crossbreeding or hybridisation, as well as plant-gathering expeditions to exotic places, greatly enlarged the range of plants available to the modern garden.

New bigger and brighter species, of dahlias and chrysanthemums for example, provided artist-gardeners with new “palettes” for their gardens – and their paintings. Renoir captured his friend Monet painting the dazzling display of dahlias in his first garden in the house he rented at Argenteuil near Paris. This included both the giant Dahlia Imperialis that had been introduced into Europe in 1863, as well as the brilliant red Dahlia Juarezi, imported from Mexico. As a pioneer member of the avant-garde Impressionist group, Monet found the garden an ideal setting to explore the informal modern-life subjects and new notions of composition and colour that were central to the Impressionist agenda. In his next garden, further from Paris at Vétheuil on the River Seine, he grew a forest of sunflowers in a terraced garden adorned with the blue-and-white pots that travelled with him from one garden to the next (The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1881; pictured). Claude Monet, Lady in the Garden, 1867. Oil on canvas. 80 x 99 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St.

Petersburg Photo © The State Hermitage Museum. Photography: Vladimir Terebenin Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Expand Claude Monet, The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil, 1881. Oil on canvas. 100 x 80 cm. Private collection, California Photo © Private collection, California. Photography: Fredrik Nilsen Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Expand In 1883, Monet had the chance to pursue his passion for gardening to the full when, with his companion Alice Hoschedé, her six children and his two sons from his first marriage, he rented Le Pressoir, a long pink house with green shutters and extensive grounds, in the village of Giverny about 50 miles from Paris. Although Monet made his garden with the express intention of providing motifs to paint, for the first 15 years that he lived there, with few exceptions, he did not paint the garden but put all his energies into creating it, digging, weeding and planting himself while the children did the watering.

In 1890, he bought the property and, as he grew famous and wealthy, he spent a fortune on plants, eventually employing as many as eight gardeners. Gardening for Monet was no amateur pursuit. His paintings of the Giverny garden are, of course, world famous, but less well known is the artist’s vast horticultural knowledge. His library was filled with numerous gardening books and entire runs of horticultural journals. Instructions sent to his chief gardener Félix Brueil in February 1900 give us an insight into his practical know-how and the meticulous attention he devoted to every detail of the garden: “From the 15th to the 25th, lay the dahlias down to root, plant out those with shoots before I get back… In March sow the grass seeds, plant out the little nasturtiums, keep a close eye on the gloxinia, orchids etc., in the greenhouse, as well as the plants under frames.” Monet designed his garden with the eye of a painter. Parallel beds were densely planted in blocks of colour, like paint boxes.

Several visitors to the garden, among them the critic Arsène Alexandre, noted the carefully orchestrated sequence of brilliant colours like “a flower palette before him to look at all year round, always present, but always changing.” Although the scheme followed an overall geometric structure, within the sections Monet planted in loose drifts of colour that almost certainly reflect the ideas of the English garden designers William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, who both promoted a new informal approach to gardening that found its truest expression in the English cottage garden. Robinson’s influential book The Wild Garden had first been published in 1870 and Monet read Jekyll’s articles in Country Life. A sea of the purple Iris germanica, one of Monet’s favourite flowers, fills The Artist’s Garden at Giverny (1900). Like other flowers Monet loved, tree peonies and chrysanthemums, for example, the iris originated in Japan. Monet embraced the vogue for japonisme, as did many of his contemporaries, and was an enthusiastic collector of Japanese prints.

The arched shape of the bridge that he designed for his new water garden (White Water Lilies, 1899; pictured) certainly owed something to prints by Hiroshige (Wisteria at Kameido Tenjin Shrine, 1856; pictured). Videos A visit to Claude Monet's garden at Giverny Curator Ann Dumas introduces Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny in Normandy, which is open to the public between March and November and maintained by a team of gardeners led by James Priest. Videos A visit to Bonnard's garden at Vernonnet Royal Academy Curator Ann Dumas introduces Pierre Bonnard’s garden at Vernonnet in Normandy (now a private home), which provided the subject matter for a number of his works in the exhibition ‘Painting the Modern Garden’. Videos A visit to Henri Le Sidaner's garden Royal Academy Curator Ann Dumas introduces Henri Le Sidaner’s garden at Gerberoy, Picardy, which provides the subject matter for a number of his works in the exhibition ‘Painting the Modern Garden’. These water landscapes have become an obsession.

Claude Monet, 1908 Claude Monet, Spring Flowers, 1864. Oil on fabric. 116 .8 x 90.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, inv. 1953.155/Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Expand Utagawa Hiroshige, Wisteria at Kameido Tenjin Shrine, 1856. Woodblock print. 35.9 x 23.8 cm. British Museum, London, inv. 1906, 1220, 0.665 © Trustees of the British Museum Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Expand In 1893, Monet acquired an extra plot of land and applied for planning permission to divert water from the small river Ru to create a water garden.

Overcoming the objections of local farmers, who feared his aquatic plants would poison the water and kill their cattle, Monet planted irises along the water’s edge, covered the Japanese bridge in wisteria and filled the pond with the new hybrid pink and red water lilies, cultivated by the specialist grower Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac. The pond was extended in 1901 greatly enlarging its original size. For the last 20 years of his life, the water garden was Monet’s obsession and his exclusive subject. At first he concentrated on the Japanese bridge spanning the dense carpet of lilies below, but then his gaze shifted to the surface of the water alone, excluding the banks and surrounding vegetation. He would rise at four to observe the play of dawn light on the water and then, as the day progressed, capture the subtlest shifts of light on water, lilies and reflections of clouds. From 1902 to 1908, he developed a series of paintings of the pond, working on several canvases at once to establish relationships between them, a process that caused him much anguish.

Finally, the series was exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris in 1909 under the title Paysages d’eau (Water Landscapes) to great acclaim. Critics were struck by the radical nature of these compositions that seemed to float free of conventional notions of perspective – in the words of the critic Roger Marx: “No more earth, no more sky, no limits now”. In the great panoramas of his final decade boundaries disappear completely in an enveloping continuum of light, air and water. Although nature was always his starting point, Monet now no longer painted directly from the motif but worked in his studio, relying on memory and his profound visual knowledge of his garden. Trails and dabs of paint, and dragged and scumbled surfaces imbue these canvases with a lyrical expressiveness that looks forward to the great abstract artists of the 20th century and remind us how misguided it is to pigeonhole Monet as exclusively an artist of the 19th century. Freed from the need to depict individual plants, his art in his final years acquired an immense painterly freedom and is, in a way, about art itself.

Yet, at the same time, Monet’s passion for gardening was undiminished to the end. We learn from a journalist visiting him in the last year of his life that he had just received water lily bulbs from Japan and was waiting for a delivery of expensive seeds that would produce brilliantly coloured flowers. After all, as Monet claimed: “My garden is my most beautiful work of art.” Monet in his garden at Giverny, 1921 (photographer unknown) Musée d’Orsay, Paris Photo © RMN-Grand Palais, Musée d’Orsay/Photography: Patrice Schmidt Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art Garden Path at Giverny, 1902 by Claude Monet Garden Path at Giverny Courtesy of Monet's paintings of his water-garden and water-lilies at Giverny occupied him for many years in the latter part of his life and were his last great work. Like the works of Turner in the final stage, they were for a long time misunderstood and unappreciated but similarly revived in esteem in the light of modern reappraisal.

By the end of 1890 Monet was making enough from the sales of his pictures to buy his house at Giverny outright and soon after began improvements to the garden which included the formation of a pond from a marshy tract by damming a stream that ran into the river Epte. He had a bridge built over the pond `in Japanese taste' and his first paintings of the water-garden in a series, 1899-1900, give prominence to the bridge with water-lilies beneath and weeping willows, by that time well-grown, around it. These pictures formed a quiet beginning to what was to become an increasingly exciting enterprise. In the second phase of forty-eight pictures produced between 1903 and 1908, he dispensed with the bridge which had been a somewhat conventional accessory, set his angle of vision nearer to the water surface and composed his picture simply of the water-lilies and reflections in the water, with only a suggestion of trees and other vegetation on the banks in the background. The pond became a sort of magic mirror holding such amazing depth and beauty of color and variety of light as can be appreciated here.

More akin to Japan in spirit that the hump-backed bridge was the decorative sense that Monet now displayed in the selection of the areas of blue and green leaf and the touches of white and red in vivid design against the deeps of color to the right and in the foreground of this painting. As the series continued Monet made modifications in his scheme of design; although he used large canvases he limited the number of plants to appear in them and increased their size. Finally he painted them from almost directly overhead, thus eliminating normal perspective, the play of light on the surface place being now the main feature. In this decorative treatment, as may be noticed in other works of the turn of the century, there came a certain suggestion of art nouveau. Water Lilies, by Claude Monet Courtesy of The water-lily pond at Monet's home in Giverny, north-west of Paris, became the principal motif of Monet's later paintings. Filling the canvas, the surface of the pond becomes a world in itself, inspiring a sense of immersion in nature. Monet's observations of the changing patterns of light on the surface of the water become almost abstract.

The paintings were not fully appreciated in Monet's lifetime, and when they were reassessed in 1950s, some critics viewed them as precursors of Abstract Expressionism. In his effort to capture just the right amount of light and dark, Monet always worked on several canvases at once and furiously followed the changing daylight. He painted intently, disregarding all the topical trends, and declared to his astonished contemporaries. In the last decades of Monet's life, his prized water garden at Giverny became a subject the artist explored obsessively, painting it 250 times between 1900 and his death. Eventually, it was his only subject. He began construction of the water garden as soon as he moved to Giverny, petitioning local authorities to divert water from a nearby river. The resulting landscape was Monet's invention entirely, and he used it as his creative focus and inspiration. The treatment of the water's surface, like the enveloppe of light and atmosphere that bathed the cathedrals and other serial subjects, unified the Giverny work.

Here, the sky has disappeared from the painting; the lush foliage rises all the way to the horizon, and space is flattened by the decorative arch of the bridge. Our attention is focused onto the painting itself and held there, not drawn into the scene depicted. In later lily pond paintings, even more of the setting evaporates, and the water's surface alone occupies the entire canvas. Floating lily pads and mirrored reflections assume equal stature, blurring distinctions between solid objects and transitory effects of light. Monet had always been interested in reflections, seeing their fragmented forms as a natural equivalent for his own broken brushwork. The subject is not important to me; what I want to reproduce is what exists between the subject and me. ” Near the end of his life, as a result of his intense efforts to place what he painted in the proper light and shade, he banished the subject from his paintings, bringing about the birth of abstract art. Monet's Gardens in Giverny by Rick Steves Monet’s Gardens in Giverny Late in life, Monet built (and painted) a pastoral paradise at his farmyard in Giverny.

By Rick Steves, Gene Openshaw, and Steve Smith Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny are like his paintings — brightly colored patches that are messy but balanced. Flowers were his brushstrokes, a bit untamed and slapdash, but part of a carefully composed design. Monet spent his last (and most creative) years cultivating his garden and his art at Giverny (zhee-vayr-nee), the Camp David of Impressionism (1883–1926). Visiting Giverny, there’s much to admire. All kinds of people flock to Giverny. Gardeners admire the earth-moving landscaping and layout, botanists find interesting new plants, and art lovers can see paintings they’ve long admired come to life. Fans enjoy wandering around the house where Monet spent half his life and seeing the boat he puttered around in, as well as the henhouse where his family got the eggs for their morning omelets. It’s a busy place, so come early or late. Claude Monet was the leading light of the Impressionist movement. He revolutionized painting in the 1870s.

Fiercely independent and dedicated to his craft, Monet gave courage to fellow artists in the face of harsh criticism. The son of a grocer, Monet defied his family, insisted he was an artist, and sketched the world around him: beaches, boats, and small-town life. A fellow artist, Eugene Boudin, encouraged him to don a scarf, set up his easel outdoors, and paint the scene exactly as he saw it. Today, we say, “Well, duh!” But “open-air” painting was unorthodox at that time for artists trained to study their subjects thoroughly in the perfect lighting of a controlled studio setting. Monet loved to lead open-air painting safaris in the countryside, in order to paint everyday things — landscapes, seascapes, ladies with parasols, family picnics — in bright, basic colors. It’s fitting that Giverny, located 50 miles outside the hustle and bustle of Paris, would become a colorful, flowering monument to Monet. In 1883, middle-aged Claude Monet, his wife Alice, and their eight children from two families settled into a farmhouse here, west of Paris.

Monet, at that point a famous artist and happiest at home, would spend 40 years in Giverny, traveling less with each passing year. He built a pastoral paradise complete with a Japanese garden and a pond full of floating lilies. In 1890, Monet started renovating his garden, inspired by tranquil scenes from the Japanese prints he collected. He diverted a river to form a pond, planted willows and bamboo on the shores, filled the pond with water lilies, then crossed it with a wooden footbridge. As years passed, the bridge became overgrown with wisteria. He painted it at different times of day and year, exploring different color schemes. In the last half of his life, Monet’s world shrank to encompass only Giverny. But his artistic vision expanded as he painted smaller details on bigger canvases and helped invent modern abstract art. In the last half of his life (beginning in 1912), Monet — the greatest visionary, literally, of his generation — began to go blind with cataracts. He used larger canvases and painted fewer details.

The true subject is not really the famous water lilies, but the changing reflections on the pond’s surface — the blue sky, white clouds, and green trees that line the shore. More Monet In Giverny, the bright, modern Museum of the Impressionists (Musée des Impressionnismes) houses temporary exhibits of Impressionist art — check their website for current shows — and has picnic-pleasant gardens in front; to reach it, turn left after leaving Monet’s place and walk 200 yards. In Paris, Monet fans get their fix at the Orangerie Museum , the Orsay Museum , and the Marmottan Museum . Gene Openshaw and Steve Smith are co-authors of the Rick Steves Paris guidebook. A Site for Sight : Monet in his Garden at Giverny Version Française : Report on a lecture entitled A Site for Sight: Monet in His Garden at Giverny, and given by Michael Marrinan, associate professor of art and art history, during a talk on 3/13/01 in the auditorium of the Cantor Center for Visual Arts as part of the Department of Art and Art History's Faculty Talks series.

Courtesy of John Sanford, writer, News Service of Stanford University. The boat on the lily pond at Giverny, photo Anne Chrysotème Every morning, a gardener would boat around the pond next to Claude Monet's house in Giverny, meticulously cleaning water lilies that had collected soot from passing trains. The master insisted that, when he got out in his boat in the morning, the water lilies would be pristine. Monet moved to Giverny, a village along the Seine about 46 miles to the west of Paris, in 1883. Here, he designed a pond, redesigned much of the garden and, most famously, created those paintings of water lilies, flower beds and the Japanese footbridge. However, many of these later works do not fit the classic definition of Impressionism. Monet's technique underwent an enormous change while at Giverny. Impressionism, a style of painting that originated in France in the 1870s, is characterized by small brush strokes aimed at reproducing reflected light and, more important, the artist's visual "impression" of an immediate scene (usually outdoors).

Monet is considered one of the founders of the style. But at Giverny, Monet's work increasingly begins to reflect his memory and emotions, rather than an impression of a transitory scene. Monet's painting style also became more "physical": The minute brushstrokes of his earlier work give way to broader brushstrokes. If the 1870s were about wrist movements ..., the 1920s were about body gestures. Along with the more "physical" motion of the brush, Monet's canvases grew larger, requiring more physical movement on the part of the viewer. Monet created the Grandes Décorations (1918-1926) - sweeping, large-scale paintings of light and images reflected in his lily pond - on panels more than 6 feet high and 9 feet wide. The paintings were intended to surround viewers, who would have to walk around a gallery to look at them.

"Nymphéas", circ.1920 (detail) Musée Marmottan, Paris "Le Jardin de Monet, les iris" Claude MONET (1900) Musée d'Orsay, Paris Monet felt more liberated to experiment with technique ­ to use larger canvases and rely less on constantly checking a motif ­ because, in his garden, he could control nature. Here, a motif was not the result of an accident but, rather, the result of deliberate organization: Monet designed the flower beds and coordinated the colors. When a white lily petal was soiled by soot, it was wiped clean. The garden was planted in light of paintings not yet painted, and paintings took on a kind of audacity in light of the fact that they were responding to a garden that had already been organized. So you get this kind of reciprocal relationship between gardening and painting. Monet ranged more widely with his technical experimentation than when he was facing the chaos of what we may call raw nature. In this way, the garden was more than a subject, but it was a site ­ a site for a specific way of seeing and, finally, a specific way of painting.

Let us compare Monet's "Boulevard des Capucines" (1873), a classic Impressionist work, to one of the 1908 water-lily paintings. The 1873 work depicts a street scene from above. Men leaning over a balcony in the right-hand side of the painting have roughly the same view of the scene as we do. In this work, Monet packed the information of a transitory moment into the frame. The painting also depicts a specific place. "Carnaval, Boulevard des Capucines à Paris" Claude Monet. (1873) Pouchkine Museum, Moscow " Nympheas" (detail) Claude Monet (1908) Private collection The water lilies, on the other hand, offer no such set of geographical coordinates; they are more dreamlike - less reflective of a specific place and point of view. Indeed, it is doubtful that Monet was checking his motifs very often while engaged in some of his later works at Giverny.

For Monet, the garden was a living still life that freed him to plumb the depths of his memory and emotions, rather than simply record his "impression" of a scene. In the same way, the series of hut-shaped haystacks Monet painted between 1890 and 1891 were, by roughly the same definition, still lifes. The hay would remain in the same form day after day. Here, we find Monet daring to experiment with color and technique in new ways. Monet no longer feels that he has to pack the image with perceptual data so as to maximize the effect of our 'instant of recognition. A new kind of duration develops in these pictures over a series of canvases. Memory, rethinking, double-backing and moving through space all become part of the act of seeing. Similarly, when working on the series of paintings of the Rouen cathedral between 1892 and 1894, Monet could improvise with his painting technique, using as his motif the unchanging façade of the church.

"La maison vue du jardin aux roses" Claude Monet (1922-1924) Musée Marmottan, Paris In 1912, Monet was diagnosed with a cataract in his right eye. Eventually, cataracts affected both eyes. The painter's failing vision pushed him even more in the direction of depicting memory and emotion. Monet's later paintings of the weeping willow, the wisteria and the Japanese footbridge, among other denizens of his garden, should not be considered geographical landmarks. Rather, they reflect the complex of sensations and memories left over - what we take away --when we visit the garden. Many of these later paintings verge on the abstract, with colors bleeding into each other and a lack of rational shape and perspective. For example, "The House Seen from the Rose Garden, 1922-1924," is an explosion of orange, yellow and red hues, but leaves the reader barely able to discern the vague shape of the house in the background.Monet's diminished sight opened up a new vista for his art, one in which memory and the unseen play a more important role than the perceptions of direct experience.

In a certain sense, we must learn to see these last pictures of his garden at Giverny not as increasingly confused by his inability to see clearly, but as pictures in which Monet's memory traces of the site he had planted and tended and lived with so long - the paths, the plants and the waterways of his garden - came to replace the ever more fragile images of his failing eye. Report by John Sanford, lecture by Michael Marrinan. Stanford University See also : Claude Monet | Water Lilies | The Met 1983.532 On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 819 As part of his extensive gardening plans at Giverny, Monet had a pond dug and planted with lilies in 1893. From 1899 on, he repeatedly turned to the subject, attempting to capture every observation, impression, and reflection of the flowers and water. By the time he began this work in the late teens, Monet had achieved a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art.

Provenance Michel Monet, Giverny (until after 1960; sold to Granoff or Callez); [?Katia Granoff, Paris and/or Meric Callez Gallery, New York, after 1960–1963]; Louise Reinhardt Smith, New York (by 1963–95) Exhibition History New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Paintings from Private Collections: Summer Loan Exhibition," July 12–September 2, 1963, no. 49 (lent by Mrs. Bertram Smith). New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Summer Loan Exhibition: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from Private Collections," July 8–September 6, 1966, no. 121 (lent by Mrs. Bertram Smith). New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "New York Collects," July 3–September 2, 1968, no. 125 (lent by Mrs. Bertram Smith). New York. Museum of Modern Art.

"Masterworks from The Louise Reinhardt Smith Collection," May 4–August 22, 1995, unnumbered cat. (as "Water Lilies with Reflection of a Willow Tree"). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "Monet in the 20th Century," September 20–December 27, 1998, no. 65 (as "Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows"). Paris. Musée National de l'Orangerie. "Monet: Le cycle des Nymphéas," May 6–August 2, 1999, no. 40. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Painters in Paris: 1895–1950," March 8–December 31, 2000, unnumbered cat. (as "Reflections, the Water Lily Pond at Giverny"). London. Royal Academy of Arts. "The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings," March 17–June 10, 2007, unnumbered cat. (fig. 265). Williamstown, Mass.

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. "The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings," June 24–September 16, 2007, unnumbered cat. (fig. 265). New York. Museum of Modern Art. "Monet's Water Lilies," September 13, 2009–April 12, 2010, unnumbered cat. (fig. 20) [withdrawn from the exhibition in February 2010]. Madrid. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. "Monet y la Abstracción," February 23–May 30, 2010, no. 24. Stockholm. Moderna Museet. "Turner, Monet, Twombly: Sent måleri," October 8, 2011–January 15, 2012, no. 69. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. "Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings," February 11–May 28, 2012, no. 69. Tate Liverpool.

"Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings," June 22–October 28, 2012, no. 69. References Robert Maillard in Denis Rouart and Jean-Dominique Rey. Monet, Water-Lilies: Or the Mirror of Time. New York, 1974, ill. p. 188 [French ed., 1972], as "Water Lilies, Reflections of the Willow". Gary Tinterow in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Notable Acquisitions, 1983–1984. New York, 1984, p. 67, ill. (color), states that it was "begun by Monet sometime in the late teens and kept in his studio until his death, [and] is one of the most complete and confidently executed pictures of the late series". Daniel Wildenstein. Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné. Vol. 4, 1899–1926: Peintures. Lausanne, 1985, pp. 276–77, no.

1858, ill., states that it once belonged to Michel Monet, the artist's son. Gary Tinterow et al. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 8, Modern Europe. New York, 1987, p. 37, colorpl. 22. Steven Z. Levine. Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self. Chicago, 1994, p. 265. Kadee Robbins in Masterworks from the Louise Reinhardt Smith Collection. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1995, pp. 30, 85, ill. p. 31 (color), includes it in the group of late paintings of water lilies, dating between 1914 and the artist's death, calling it part of a series "dedicated to the reflection of a willow tree, demonstrating the increasing dominance of the water". J. Kirk T. Varnedoe in Masterworks from the Louise Reinhardt Smith Collection. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1995, p. 17. Daniel Wildenstein.

Monet. Vol. 4, Catalogue raisonné–Werkverzeichnis: Nos. 1596–1983 et les grandes décorations. 2nd ed. Cologne, 1996, p. 881, no. 1858, ill. (color). George T. M. Shackelford and Mary Anne Stevens in Monet in the 20th Century. Ed. Paul Hayes Tucker and Mary Anne Stevens. Exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston, 1998, pp. 192, 218, 283, no. 65, ill. (color), as "Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows"; dates it 1916–19. Pierre Georgel. Monet: Le cycle des "Nymphéas," catalogue sommaire. Exh. cat., Musée National de l'Orangerie. Paris, 1999, pp. 42, 57, no. 40, ill. (color), dates it about 1915–19.

Karin Sagner-Düchting in Monet and Modernism. Ed. Karin Sagner-Düchting. Exh. cat., Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung. Munich, 2001, p. 69, ill. p. 94 (color). Richard Kendall in James A. Ganz and Richard Kendall. The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings. Exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London. Williamstown, Mass., 2007, pp. 242, 263, 265, 302, fig. 265 (color), dates it about 1918; links it to a sketchbook drawing depicting "Monet's graphic shorthand for lilypads" (sketchbook 6, fol. 8v, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; D347). Eric M. Zafran in Claude Monet (1840–1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff. Exh. cat., Wildenstein & Co., Inc. New York, 2007, p.

140. Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence. Claude Monet: Water Lilies. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 2009, p. 25, fig. 20 (color), date it 1914–26; note that this is one of the paintings reserved in June 1956 by Alfred Barr, for Museum of Modern Art trustees and donors, at Katia Granoff's gallery, Paris. Paloma Alarcó. Monet y la Abstracción. Exh. cat., Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid, 2010, pp. 29, 302, 322, ill. p. 117 (color), dates it 1916–19. Jeremy Lewison. Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings. Exh. cat., Moderna Museet. Stockholm, 2011, p. 260, no. 69, ill. pp. 222–23 (color). Kathryn Calley Galitz. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings.

New York, 2016, pp. 10, 522, no. 439, ill. pp. 471, 522 (color). Notes In 1893, Monet had a lily pond dug and planted at his house in Giverny. Beginning in 1899, and continuing for the rest of his life, paintings of this pond were the dominant theme of Monet's art. This painting illustrates the fluid, nearly abstract style the artist developed through these water lily paintings. Timeline of Art History (2000-present) Essays

Question: Who painted a number of paintings of water lilies in his garden at Giverny?
Answer: CLAUDE MONET