'The Artist's Garden at Giverny', Claude Monet (Orsay Museum, Paris)
monet bought a farm in Giverny. It was a rustic, unassuming building. He reformed it and settled there with Alice Hoschedé, whom he would marry. Between them they had six children. His studio occupied an old barn.
He had distanced himself from the Impressionists. The death of Camille, his first wife, accentuated his misanthropy. he eluded Paris . In Normandy the landscape was soft, green, fluvial. He became fond of botany.
His vision shaped the garden. He broke the containment of the flower beds and created a lush environment. He worked with his gardener to extend fields of color on earth. He raised arches and pergolas which he covered with climbing plants.
This was his paradise
Lilies cover half the canvas that he painted years later, in the spring of the year 1900. The flowers overflow on the paths that lead to the facade. Greenish, pinkish, orange tones they dissolve under the shade of the trees. **
Monet collected Japanese prints. The landscapes that appeared in the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige had exerted a great influence on his work. He recreated that way of seeing on a piece of land he purchased outside the farm boundaries.
From a stream he fashioned a pond covered with water lilies. He traced winding paths between bamboos and peonies, and built a wooden bridge like the ones that appeared in the prints.
Monet often worked in series that they represented the same reason at different times of the day or through the seasons.
Two years after painting the lily bed, he rented a room opposite Rouen Cathedral and painted thirty versions of its Gothic facade. In all of them the frame is identical. It only changes the temporary. Each work fixes the perception of an instant.
“The object is not important. What I want to reproduce is what exists between me and the object”, he stated.
Beginning in 1892 he carried this principle to its ultimate consequences in the geography of the pond. In the two hundred and fifty works that comprise the series Water Lilies, or Nymphae, he looked for the oscillation of a hue or the reflection of the clouds on the water.
Detail of Monet's 'Nymphéas' room
He considered that the sequence would take him beyond the ephemeral. Both the garden and the canvases of it projected an inner state.
Proust, whose relation to impressionism has been treated on numerous occasions, he describes in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time a garden that could be the one that appears in this series:
"As in that place the banks were thick with trees, the tall shadows of these overlooked the water a background that used to be dark green , but that sometimes when we returned home some clear evenings, which followed stormy afternoons– I saw a light and intense blue, bordering on violet, with a honeycombed appearance and a Japanese taste. Here and there on the surface it blushed, like a strawberry, a nymphaeal flower with a scarlet heart and white borders.”
Though Monet he never consciously sought abstraction, in his last stage the color breaks down and the brushstroke becomes a gesture.
More than representing a motif, the images seem to reflect on themselves. To carry out the murals that They are exhibited at the Musée de la Orangerie in Paris. it was necessary for him to broaden his study. The canvas had become a space for action.
250 works of his he dedicated to his muses
decades later, the painter Mark Rothko perceived in these murals the sleepless nights in search of a tone or a reflection. The aquatic flow marked the starting point towards the color fields of him.
The Artist's Garden at Giverny is exhibited in the Orsay's Museum , in Paris. The painter's house, today the headquarters of the Claude Monet Foundation, can be visited between April and November.
Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France