.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘The basic element of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance changes at every instant because of the way bits of the sky are reflected in it, giving it life and movement. The passing cloud, the fresh breeze, the threat or arrival of a rainstorm, the sudden fierce gust of wind, the fading or suddenly refulgent light all these things, unnoticed by the untutored eye, create changes in colour and alter the surface of the water. It can be smooth, unruffled, and then, suddenly, there will be a ripple, a movement that breaks up into almost imperceptible wavelets or seems to crease the surface slowly, making it look like a wide piece of watered silk. The same for the colours, for the changes of light and shade, the reflections’ (Monet, quoted in C. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 289).
These late pictures of Monet’s cherished water lilies, which culminated in the celebrated friezes now hanging in their specially-tailored environment in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, initially met with mixed reactions, yet now they are considered some of the most important works of art of the Twentieth Century and hang in many of the world’s greatest museums. These innovative, trailblazing icons manage to be searingly modern and at the same time to convey a vivid sense of the undulations of the surface of the water and the bobbing water lilies. This marked the beginning of a new artistic odyssey that would largely occupy Monet for the rest of his life, and which would result in such bracing, beautiful explorations of colour and light as Nymphéas.
In this picture, the superfluous details are stripped out, instead using thickly applied, green, blue and ochre paint to focus completely on the quicksilver-like water itself. ‘I work all day on these canvases,’ Monet told one of his visitors, René Gimpel, during a visit in 1918. ‘One after another, I have them brought to me. A colour will appear again which I’d seen and daubed on one of these canvases the day before. Quickly the picture is brought over to me, and I do my utmost to fix the vision definitively, but it generally disappears as fast as it arose, giving way to a different colour already tried several days before on another study, which at once is set before me— and so it goes the whole day!’’ (quoted in C. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 307).
These late pictures of Monet’s cherished water lilies, which culminated in the celebrated friezes now hanging in their specially-tailored environment in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, initially met with mixed reactions, yet now they are considered some of the most important works of art of the Twentieth Century and hang in many of the world’s greatest museums. These innovative, trailblazing icons manage to be searingly modern and at the same time to convey a vivid sense of the undulations of the surface of the water and the bobbing water lilies. This marked the beginning of a new artistic odyssey that would largely occupy Monet for the rest of his life, and which would result in such bracing, beautiful explorations of colour and light as Nymphéas.
In this picture, the superfluous details are stripped out, instead using thickly applied, green, blue and ochre paint to focus completely on the quicksilver-like water itself. ‘I work all day on these canvases,’ Monet told one of his visitors, René Gimpel, during a visit in 1918. ‘One after another, I have them brought to me. A colour will appear again which I’d seen and daubed on one of these canvases the day before. Quickly the picture is brought over to me, and I do my utmost to fix the vision definitively, but it generally disappears as fast as it arose, giving way to a different colour already tried several days before on another study, which at once is set before me— and so it goes the whole day!’’ (quoted in C. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 307).