Description
"One instant, one aspect of nature contains everything," said Claude Monet, referring to his last masterpieces, the waterscapes he produced at his Giverny home between 1897 and his death in 1926.
These works replaced the various contemporary subjects he had painted from the 1870s through the 1890s with a single, timeless motif: water lilies. The focal point of these paintings was the artist's beloved flower garden, which featured a water garden and a smaller pond spanned by a Japanese footbridge. In his first series of water lilies (1897-1899), Monet painted the surroundings of the pond, with its plants, bridges and trees perfectly divided by a fixed horizon. Over time, the artist became less and less concerned with conventional pictorial space. When he painted Water Lilies, which comes from his third group of these works, he had completely dispensed with the horizon line. In this spatially ambiguous canvas, the artist looked down, concentrating solely on the surface of the pond, with its clump of vegetation floating amidst the reflection of sky and trees. Monet thus created the image of a horizontal surface on a vertical one.
Water Lilies is not the name of a single painting, but the name of a series of works. During his life, Claude Monet returns to this theme several times and paints more than 250 paintings of water lilies. Along with The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh , water lilies are the most iconic images of impressionism.
The first series of "Water Lilies", a total of twenty-five canvases, was exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1900. This was followed nine years later by a second series of forty-eight canvases. "These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession," Monet wrote on August 11, 1908. "This is beyond the strength of an old man, and yet I want to express what I feel. I have destroyed some of the canvases. I start once again... I hope something will come out of all this effort."
We can say that the artist really had unprecedented success in painting his series of Water Lilies, a series loved by the entire art world.