Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (19 page)

Monet at work in July 1915 with Blanche beside him

In the photograph taken that July day, one of Monet’s stepgrand-children, six-year-old Nitia Salerou, occupies the foreground, her presence a reminder that, despite Monet’s continual complaints about his solitude, his house was still the center of his extended family. In the painting itself, the mauve-shadowed blue of the sky is mirrored in tranquil water streaked green with the reflections of weeping willows and dotted with water lilies, their pads outlined in blue. Their flowers are bright sparks of red and yellow or, in the cluster beyond them, delicate shades of pale blue.

It is a stunningly beautiful painting. The photograph and canvas both suggest a pleasing summer idyll, a humming late afternoon shading
into the mauves of a warm, tranquil evening. Yet appearances are deceiving. The day of the photograph was actually unseasonably cool, with a high of only 19.8 degrees Celsius recorded at the Eiffel Tower, and with clouds and spots of rain throughout the day.
²¹
Two days earlier a violent storm had struck Paris: lightning started a fire at a hospital and powerful winds toppled chimneys and trees. A tree in the Tuileries fell on a statue of a former prime minister, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, and—ominously—badly damaged the allegorical figure of France.
²²
Monet was evidently making the most of a poor day, and the huge parasol was to protect him (and his canvas) from the rain rather than the sun.

So inclement was the weather across Western Europe that throughout the summer of 1915, despite the testimony of meteorologists, people began blaming the constant rainfall on gunfire on the western front.
²³
“I have not stopped working despite the bad weather, which has severely hampered my studies,” he wrote in the middle of August to the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, Gaston and Josse. They were gallery owners who had exhibited not only Monet’s work but also that of his son-in-law, Theodore Earl Butler. During Monet’s dark years following the death of Alice, they had given small dinners in his honor in Paris, sought out specialist eye doctors for him, and in the summer of 1913 hosted him at their neo-Gothic villa in Villers-sur-Mer, near Deauville.
²⁴
They invited him back to Bois-Lurette in the summer of 1915, but Monet declined their offer. Any fine summer weather was to be spent at the easel, not enjoying refreshing breezes at a luxurious villa on the Normandy coast.

MONET’S DETERMINED EFFORTS
before his canvas were captured once again that summer, by Sacha Guitry on a hand-cranked camera. The manifesto signed by the eminent German scholars and published the previous October in the
Berliner Tageblatt
had spurred Guitry into a cinematic response with the help of some of the French cultural luminaries who had put their names to
Les Allemands: destructeurs des cathédrales
. He began journeying around France with Charlotte Lysès and a camera, capturing these living monuments to French cultural excellence for a film to be called
Ceux de chez nous
(
Those from our Home
). The
responses of his subjects varied, with Rodin, for one, unimpressed with both Guitry’s camera and the concept of cinema: “Call it what you will, it’s still nothing more than photography.”
²⁵
Nonetheless, Rodin acceded to Guitry’s wishes, and the newfangled equipment captured the bearded sculptor chipping away at a statue, looking handsome and vigorous in a black beret, with a broad forehead and strong cheekbones that might have come from his own chisel.

Less impressive a physical specimen was the arthritic Renoir, whom Guitry filmed at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the middle of June, finding him in a wheelchair “bent double with pain” but utterly devoid of “melancholy and sadness.”
²⁶
By an unfortunate coincidence, Guitry and his camera arrived on the day that Renoir’s wife, who had died a few days earlier, was to be buried. “It must be terribly painful, Monsieur Renoir,” Guitry murmured sympathetically. “Painful?” retorted Renoir from his wheelchair. “You bet my foot is painful!”
²⁷
In the film, Renoir appears gaunt, with a wispy beard and an enormous peaked beret. Assisted by his youngest son, fourteen-year-old Claude (known as Coco), he puffs on a cigarette, raising great clouds of smoke as—in an image of courageous determination—he dabs away at a canvas, his paintbrush tied to his gnarled hands with ribbons of cloth.

Guitry had more difficulties with the reclusive and miserable Degas, who refused to be filmed. Forced to skulk outside the painter’s apartment on the boulevard de Clichy, he was finally rewarded with ten seconds of Degas walking obliviously along the pavement with his niece, Jeanne Levre: a figure with a white ruff of beard, wearing a bowler hat, and carrying a rolled umbrella.

Guitry was assured of a warmer reception when he and Charlotte arrived in Giverny. His footage opens with Monet wearing his straw hat and talking amiably with Guitry, sporting a boater, in the graveled path before the house. Nitia Salerou and two small dogs disport themselves in the background. The capering dogs were presumably Nitia’s. Monet loved birds and animals, even leaving the windows of his dining room open so the sparrows could help themselves to bread crumbs from the table. Japanese chickens, a gift from Clemenceau, ranged freely through the gardens and
even in the studio, where the master fed them from his own hand. However, he refused to own dogs or cats for fear of the havoc they might cause with his flowers. Even Jean-Pierre’s Irish water spaniel, Lassis, prizewinner at a 1913 dog show in Caen, was banned from the garden.
²⁸

Still shot of Monet and Sacha Guitry from the film
Ceux de chez nous

The film cuts to a view of the wind-ruffled lily pond, the camera panning slowly right to left, capturing the irises, the archipelagoes of water lilies, and the Japanese bridge, all looking beautifully well-kept despite Monet’s complaints about losing his gardeners to the trenches. Then, in the distance, the master appears at work beneath his giant parasol on the edge of the pond. The canvas—one of his
grandes études
—looms over him.

The film cuts again, this time to a close-up of a relaxed and genial Monet standing before the canvas, a cigarette with an inch of ash dangling from his mouth, followed by seventy-seven seconds of the master at work. He is looking not straight ahead, toward the bridge, but
rather—because the canvas is so large—at a 90-degree angle to his right, toward the willow whose branches are draped over the water. He holds his brush by its end as he adds a few strokes to the canvas, constantly throwing appraising glances to his right. Then, as the branches stir in the wind, he selects another brush from the small bouquet in his hand. He cleans it with a rag, mixes paint on the giant palette—shaped like a lily pad—and dabs away again, the canvas wobbling slightly in the wind and under the pressure of his touch. It is a lively, self-assured performance, with Monet occasionally turning his face (brow and eyes shaded by his hat) to chat briefly at the camera.

Then the camera films a long view from the opposite bank. Monet steps back from the canvas and wipes his hands on a large handkerchief before walking away. Even allowing for the accelerated pace produced by Guitry’s hand-cranked camera, his gait looks remarkably jaunty, almost a jig.

MONET’S NEW STUDIO
was completed, after many “troubles and worries,” in less than four months of work.
²⁹
He wrote the Bernheim-Jeune brothers at the end of October to report that he had finally settled into “my beautiful studio.”
³⁰
His reservations about the structure had receded, in part because the grand new space, though physically unattractive from the outside, allowed him to appraise his work. “I’ll finally be able to judge what I’ve done,” he told Geffroy in the middle of October, eagerly anticipating being able to spread out his large canvases in the kind of cavernous space to which he hoped they were destined.
³¹
He placed them on large easels fitted with casters so they could be trundled around the wooden floor. These canvases were evidently multiplying. Monet worked “enormously hard” through the autumn of 1915 despite falling ill and being confined to bed for a time—“possibly due to a bit of overwork,” he explained to Geffroy, “nothing serious, though it’s a hassle if, like me, you’re used to living outdoors.”
³²

No sooner was the studio finished than, early in November, Monet made a long-delayed trip to Paris to visit friends, including Mirbeau, who had taken an apartment in the city for the winter, and Gaston and
Josse Bernheim-Jeune, with whom he had dinner. This second winter of the war saw the gastronomical pleasures of Paris beginning to dwindle. Seafood, Monet’s particular delight, became a rare and expensive treat because of the mobilization of fishermen, the bad weather, and the perils of German U-boats in coastal waters. On the day of Monet’s arrival in the city, an “indignant clamour” arose at Les Halles, Paris’s central food market, over the price of fish, with several hundred outraged buyers running amok and overturning crates containing the daily catch. The disturbance was swiftly quelled, but the government began taking measures to provision the city with game and frozen meat, and to stockpile coal for the coming winter.
³³

Signs of the war were still all too evident. The racecourse at Longchamp had been turned into a pasture for cows to graze, while the courtyard of the Invalides displayed captured German cannons and airplanes. Bomb damage could also be seen: in March several Zeppelins had navigated down the Oise Valley and then, swinging into Paris’s western suburbs, dropped their bombs over the “Pays des Impressionnistes.” As Monet’s train chugged toward the Gare Saint-Lazare he might have seen, had he looked the left, the house in the rue Amélie in Asnières destroyed by a Zeppelin, and a few minutes later, if he looked to the right, the shattered roof of the building in the rue Dulong in the Batignolles, hit that same evening. These places possessed artistic rather than any strategic value, leaving a French newspaper to joke bitterly that the Germans were attacking the “Fortress of Asnières” and the “Fortress of the Batignolles.”
³⁴
The Germans may even have made some sort of an attempt on the “Fortress of Giverny” since in May 1915, two months after the Zeppelin raids, the aerial war had come to Monet’s village in the grisly shape of “an enormous spherical balloon” that, stained with blood and minus its gondola and aeronauts, crash-landed in Giverny; an uprooted cherry sapling was caught in its three-hundred-meter-long cables. Probably a German observation balloon shot down by “balloon buster” pilots, it was deflated and removed for inspection to Vernon.
³⁵

During Monet’s two-day stay in Paris, Georges Clemenceau was elected president of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, a position of
considerable power. Clemenceau’s outspoken attacks on the prosecution of the war—the inadequate munitions and medical services, the poor strategic planning of the generals—had been continuing unabated. His enemies accused him of “hateful and harmful politicking,”
³⁶
and in August his newspaper was once again suspended. He was, however, forging himself a reputation as the champion of the
poilus
, or “hairy ones,” as the supposedly unshaven and unkempt French soldiers were popularly known. At the end of September he made a trip to the trenches to see their conditions for himself. His report sought to allay criticism that he was “never happy” with the conduct of the military—and his report was, indeed, remarkably sanguine. He soon found himself “in the middle of the action” during a “great and happy offensive” by the French troops. He spoke to one and all, he claimed, and his experience left him with “something more than mere impressions” of the situation. His conclusion must have taken aback those who saw him as the voice of doom: “I feel a great joy to say that everything I’ve seen has given me a great satisfaction.”
³⁷