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Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) French WATERLILIES, 1903 Oil on canvas Height 32 inches Width 40 inches Gift of Mr. Joseph Rubin, 1953.11 |
In this work, one of Claude Monet's quintessential waterlily paintings, the
picture plane is completely filled with an impression of light and color
reflected from the surface of a lily pond. Neither people, land, nor horizon
line break our focused, hypnotic gaze into this cool and soothing scene of a
pond on a warm summer's day. Cut off from an exact sense of place or narrative
theme, this painting seems amazingly modern for its nearly abstract qualities,
even more so considering its date of execution.
Like Waterlilies, some of Monet's most important explorations in color
and composition were made in the gardens of his home at Giverny, some 30 miles
west of Paris. He had installed an ornamental water garden that proved to be the
focal point for dozens of his explorations of color and light. Monet began
painting his waterlily scenes as a nonintentional series of color and light
studies. His repetitive studies of various features of the French countryside
around him - poplar trees, haystacks, snowbound villages, and even the
façade of the Rouen Cathedral - show
an artist whose keen eye and searching intellect were not content to rest
after capturing the effects of light, shade, and color only once.
By 1903, the date of this work, this style of painting, Impressionism, had
become widely accepted in the art world and highly influential with collectors
and young artists alike. Monet was a traditionally trained artist who had become
dissatisfied with the somewhat dry and predictable painting produced by artists
of the French Academy. Unlike them, Monet favored painting directly from nature
(en plein air), setting up his canvases in the
outdoors to capture his fleeting "impressions" of a scene as it appeared to him
under different conditions of weather or lighting.
Dominique H. Vasseur
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism. Exhibition catalogue, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1978.
Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1961.
