Monet and his Remarkable​Water Lily Paintings

My already worn copy of a great book! 

Monet and his Remarkable
​Water Lily Paintings
By Annette Bartlett-Golden

​Convalescing from a bad cold, I spent the first three weeks after Christmas with Claude Monet in the French country village of Giverny, forty miles northwest of Paris. He was in his sixties by then and living with his second wife, Alice, and eight children in a large farmhouse with an enormous studio. Just beyond the back door lay a garden paradise of Monet’s own design with a profusion of flowers and a green Japanese bridge spanning a spectacular water lily pond. Many of his paintings hung in the homes of wealthy Americans and the feisty politician Georges Clemenceau was one of his best friends. I had been gifted Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King and with each page I sunk deeper into the world of Monet.

While I had long admired the paintings of the French Impressionist artists, particularly those by Monet, I knew relatively little about his life. I was pleased to learn that he had a stable family life, was beloved by his children and step children, as well as by a devoted circle of friends, and that he became quite wealthy in his later years.  I did not know that in his early seventies, despite suffering from impaired vision caused by cataracts, Monet struggled to paint. At times, he became so overcome with frustration that he would destroy his paintings.
 
Nor did I realize the scope of Monet’s genius or the significance of his late works, which were primarily comprised of paintings of his water lily pond, of which there are about 250 surviving canvases. In this most ambitious series Monet set out to achieve the impossible, as he called it, on a grand scale: painting the ever changing surface of the pond on huge wall sized canvases. The results were stunning. Brilliant, shimmering nuances of color leap from the canvases resonant with dauntless expression. These works were “Larger, bolder, more experimental, visionary, and abstract,’’ writes Ross King (p. 304). “Arguably, only Michelangelo and Titian ever achieved as much, or developed as forcefully as they worked in their ninth decades.”

After reading Mad Enchantment I now see Monet and his art with new eyes. The water lily paintings that I have admired for their depiction of ephemeral natural beauty are also imbued with the raw emotions of Monet’s life experiences at the time: the loss of his second wife and two grown children, the horrors of World War I, and his deteriorating eyesight.  Yet it is this which gives the paintings a power and depth that make them even more beautiful and remarkable than his previous works. I was also struck by Monet’s keen focus on the water lily theme, a lesson that would benefit me to keep in mind. Certainly, Ross King’s account of Claude Monet and his water lily paintings has increased my understanding and appreciation for a much beloved artist.

Here I am next to Claude Monet's Charing Cross Bridge, Reflections on the Thames at the Baltimore Museum of Art.