Claude Monet’s Water Lily Paintings
Claude Monet’s Water Lily Paintings https://www.reproduction-gallery.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/claude-monet-Water-Lilies-1916-1919-B.jpg 961 720 Blog – Reproduction Gallery Blog – Reproduction Gallery https://www.reproduction-gallery.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/claude-monet-Water-Lilies-1916-1919-B.jpg December 7, 2021 September 11, 2023
Claude Monet’s Water Lilies is a series of around 250 oil paintings, painted from 1897 until the artists’ death in 1926.
Claude Monet paintings focus on the flower garden and pond at Giverny, a commune in the Normandy region of France. The small village was on the “Right Bank” of the River Seine where it met the River Epte. These works captivated Monet for the last thirty years of his life, many of them painted whilst he was suffering from cataracts. As a result, they offer fascinating insights into the artist’s stylistic progression alongside his deteriorating health.
Claude Monet artworks exemplify the French impressionist movement. It actually got its name from a Claude Monet painting, Impression, Sunrise (1872). Truly modern in their approach, the impressionists rejected traditional classical styles. They instead focused purely on the changing effects of light, often painting “en plein air”.
Before we explore the most exciting Claude Monet Lily Pad paintings, it is important to understand the history and context of these stunning artworks.
Claude Monet Water Lilies: A Brief History
Monet rented the estate at Giverny in 1883. He fell in love with the site for its painting studio, the orchards and of course, the beautiful gardens. As the artist’s career skyrocketed, he was able to buy the estate in the late 1890s.
Monet became increasingly interested in horticulture from the early 1890s onwards. Along with a small team of gardeners, he diverted the nearby river to form the iconic pond. Monet planted his famed water lilies around the pond, in addition to weeping willows, exotic flowers and bamboo trees. Inspired by the increasing influence of Japonisme, he even created a small Japanese bridge.
This bridge became a recurring motif in Monet’s dreamlike bucolic landscape. It’s seen in masterpieces such as Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge 1899. Over the course of his entire oeuvre, the bridge featured in over two hundred Claude Monet paintings.
An icon of impressionism
The first Claude Monet Water Lilies series comprised 25 artworks. First exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in the French capital in 1900 – they wowed the Parisian public.
Monet finished his second Water Lily series in 1907, consisting of 48 canvases. They were so popular that the French state built two dedicated rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Based in the west corner of the Tuileries Gardens next to the Place de la Concorde in Paris, it certainly was a prestigious location. The exhibition opened in 1927, sadly just months after Monet passed away.
The Water Lilies by Claude Monet
Offered to the French State by the painter Claude Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death. This unique set, a true « Sixtine Chapel of Impressionism » in the words of André Masson in 1952, testifies to Monet’s later work. It was designed as a real environment and crowns the Water Lilies cycle begun nearly thirty years before. The set is one of the largest monumental achievements of early twentieth-century painting.
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Claude Monet, the impressionist of the landscape
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Claude Monet was born in Paris and grew up in Normandy in the town of Le Havre. He was introduced to the representation of nature in painting through contact with the painter Eugène Boudin (1824-1898). He arrived in Paris in 1859 and entered the studio of Charles Gleyre (1806-1874), where he made the acquaintance of the painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) and Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870). Edouard Manet influenced him in the early 1860s, while he was developing more personal landscapes.
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After taking refuge in London during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Monet settled in Argenteuil on his return to France. Claude Monet is known as one of the most famous painters of the Impressionist movement, which takes its name from one of his compositions: Impression, soleil levant [Impression, Sunrise], dated 1872 (Musée Marmottan, Paris). He took part in most of the Impressionist exhibitions from 1874.
In 1883, he moved to his property in Giverny, in Normandy. In this period he developed the representation of certain subjects in the form of series: Meules de foin [Haystacks], Peupliers [Poplars], Cathédrale de Rouen [Rouen Cathedral], etc.
From the end of the 1890s until his death in 1926, the painter primarily devoted himself to the Nymphéas [Water Lilies] cycle, of which the Musée de l’Orangerie possesses a unique set. Indeed, the artist conceived several works specifically for the building, and gave his first two large panels to the Nation as a symbol of peace, the day after the armistice, on November 12, 1918. He also conceived a unique space, composed of two elliptical rooms within the museum, giving the viewer the « illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore » in his own words, making the Nymphéas of the Musée de l’Orangerie an achievement by the artist that is unparalleled throughout the world.
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