By the time Claude Monet embarked on his daring series of water lily canvases he was a celebrated and extremely wealthy man. Decades earlier, Monet’s experiments had provoked more than their share of outrage and insult – one critic described a seascape as “less skilful than crude wallpaper” – but Monet’s brand of Impressionism was now part of the artistic mainstream. Some even regarded it as rather passé: Matisse was always a fan, but the cocksure Cubists and Pointillists were markedly less enthusiastic.
Not that Monet had to worry. In 1912 his paintings raked in 369,000 francs at a time when a labourer in Paris could expect to earn just a thousand francs per annum. Monet could easily afford to lavish 40,000 francs each year on the gardens at Giverny and to indulge his passion for the newfangled automobile (he had secured his first speeding ticket back in 1904).
Regrettably, Monet was not in the mood to create new masterpieces. His wife, Alice, had died from leukaemia in 1911, causing, Monet confessed, “the terrible grief that breaks the heart and ravages the mind”.
He lost his son Jean, aged just 46, in 1914. Adding to his woes, Monet’s eyesight had begun to fail, so his vision was sometimes, as Ross King puts it, muddy, bland and indistinct.
We apparently have Monet’s loyal friend Georges Clémenceau to thank for lifting the artist out of his melancholy and sending him back to the paintbrushes. We now also owe King gratitude for providing a lyrical and dynamic account of the famous lily paintings’ creation.
King’s praise for the images is abundant, even excessive. Cézanne famously remarked that “Monet is only an eye but, good Lord, what an eye!” King discerns much more in the technique of the later Monet: virtuosic control of awkward perspective, brilliant experiments with the “fugitive effects of colour and light” and, above all, the astonishing collapse of the boundary between depiction and abstraction. Perhaps, but even if one suspects that the Water Lilies have always been overrated, it is hugely rewarding to learn so much about how they were crafted.
Equally fascinating is the curious tale of their route to a public audience. Some of the biggest and boldest ended up together in the Musée de l’Orangerie as a posthumous gift to the French nation, but only after tortuous negotiations during which Monet appears to have irritated almost everyone with his demands about how they ought to be displayed. At one point, even Clémenceau’s patience wore thin: “I don’t want you to take me for a lackey,” he wrote, “who performed a disservice to art and to France by bowing to the whims of his friend.”
Monet, it seems, could be a tricky character: “volatile, insecure, and prone to petulance, frustration and despair”. King spots an irony in the fact that paintings as tranquil as the Water Lilies were produced by an artist who, on occasion, pushed his feet through canvases or slashed his work with a penknife.
Still, a measure of ferocity was no doubt useful when securing such a triumph of the will. Monet overcame old age, illness and profound sadness in order to give us his water lilies.
The chaos of a world war didn’t help, and Monet once admitted that “I feel a little embarrassed about making investigations into shape and colour while so many people are suffering and dying for us.”
No embarrassment was called for, and we can all mock the visitor to Giverny who suggested that the water lily paintings might make excellent decorations for public swimming baths. That, assuredly, would have been a waste.
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