Some years back, my dad gifted me an illustrated diary. While going through its pages, I saw the picture of a magnificent painting, which literally captured my heart. That was the first time I came to know about Claude Monet and Impressionism. The painting ‘The Water Lily Pond’ was such astonishing with mysterious depiction of a water lily pond with a bridge across it and the whole painting was nothing but some brilliant hazy brush strokes tempting the viewer to indulge in its alluring charm forever. Obviously, I was impressed by the overwhelming charisma and the bizarre style of it and collected as much information I could, which made me write this one.
In April 1874, a painting named ‘Impression; Sunrise’ by Claude Monet was debuted at an exhibition in Paris, which gave rise to a revolutionary style of painting, the ‘Impressionism’. There were 30 participants including Camille Pizarro, Pierre-Augusta Renoir, Alfred Sisley etc. and around 200 paintings were exhibited. Impression; Sunrise became the most celebrated one but was hugely criticized due to the lack of artistic temperament, its loose brush strokes and an obscure style. Art historian Paul Smith accused Monet for naming the painting Impression, and claimed that it is to conceal the imperfections. In spite of all these criticisms, the painting style gained widespread reputation and is attributed to giving rise to the Impressionist movement. The exhibition later came to be known as the ‘Exhibition of the Impressionists’.
In a satirical review of the exhibition for the newspaper Le Charivari, it is the critic Louis Leroy who first used the word ‘Impressionism’ to describe the novel style of Impression; Sunrise but was immediately taken up by everyone, accelerating the spread of Impressionist movement across different parts of the world.
Impression; Sunrise is a depiction of the port of Le Havre in the hometown of Monet, situated in the northwest of France. He started painting different versions of Le Havre from different light settings and viewpoints in 1872, in order to produce a series of works and as a result of which were born six paintings including Impression; Sunrise and they portrayed the port during dawn, day, dusk and dark. In contrast with Realism which emphasize on elementary details and perfectionism, Impressionism tries to visualize the sensation evoked by natural scenery on the artist.
The Nymphéas cycle aka The Water Lily Series is a series of around 250 oil paintings depicting the Water Lily pond in Monet’s garden at his house in Giverny, France. The word ‘Nymphéa’ came from the Greek word ‘Numphé’, meaning nymph. According to one of the classical Greek myths, a flower would be born from the nymph who was dying of her love for Hercules.
Monet was once smitten by the beauty of the French village Giverny while he was travelling by a train. So he rented a house there in 1883 which later became his home. He then adorned his property with gardens and converted the marshy lands into stunning landscapes to foster his art within. With immense effort, he could create such splendid natural sceneries so that later he indulged in their beauty and occupied himself capturing them on his paintings by depicting different versions of the same theme reflecting the changes in lighting and weather conditions, till the end of his life. Once he even declared that “I’m good at nothing except painting and gardening.”
After a decade in Giverny, he determinedly diverted the River Epte, a tributary of the Seine to create a water garden for himself in his two acre property. In order to create a Water Lily pond, he imported water lilies from Egypt and South America despite the objections from the Local Council and his neighbors that he would poison their water with exotic flowers and started painting the series by 1890. He also built a Japanese style bridge across the pond. Around 17 different depictions of the bridge were made in 1899. Also, there is an unusual one in this series depicting the vertical view of the bridge emphasizing the water lilies and their reflections in the pond. As time passed, the focus of paintings were shrunken to cut off the horizon completely, leaving only the center of the pond and the water lilies as Monet concentrated more on the astounding changes in light and reflections of the overlying sky with the changes in weather.
In 1918, he made a special oval room and placed there a series of 12 huge water lily paintings side by side where viewers could get an entire panoramic view, and, according to Monet, “the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or bank.” He also said that they were intended to create “the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium.”
After the end of World War I in 1918, he has even given a ‘Monument of Peace’ to his homeland, French, in the form of huge Water Lily paintings which were later used as decorative panels in the Musée de L’Orangerie at Paris’s Tuileries Gardens. But his water lily paintings were hugely criticized in his later life as his eye sight was failing him due to cataract, which resulted in coarse thickly applied strokes of blue, purple and green in his further paintings. Critics claimed that the imperfections were largely due to his blurred vision rather than Impressionism. Even during his death in 1926, his Water Lily series were largely ignored and left unattended in his Giverny studio.
Later with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the Water Lily Series were resurrected and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) bought their first Monet painting from the series in 1955. Inspired from Impressionism, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne etc developed Post Impressionism. During a terrible fire in MoMA in 1958, six of the series were damaged, shattering the hearts of Impressionist lovers. Rest of the paintings are on display at various museums including the Musée Marmottan Monet, casting its enchanting spell of enigmatic beauty originated in the impressionist style, over the art lovers all over the world.
Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge - (1897-1899)
“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)
Comments