Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (3 page)

MONET’S ARRIVAL IN
Giverny had not been particularly auspicious. In April 1883, the very month that he moved into the village, a reviewer claimed that his work was simply beyond the comprehension of the general public. Monet enjoyed the esteem of a small band of admirers, the critic admitted, but the public at large still held out stubbornly against him. “Monet paints in a strange language,” he claimed, “whose secrets, together with a few initiates, he alone possesses.”
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Besides this unintelligible style, Monet had brought a whiff of scandal to Giverny. Following the death of his wife Camille in 1879—and possibly before—he had taken up with a married woman named Alice Hoschedé. She was the estranged wife of a bankrupt businessman, Ernest Hoschedé. Among Hoschedé’s ruinous investments had been sixteen Monet paintings, including
Impression, Sunrise
, the work whose title, according to a myth as persistent as it is erroneous, gave the Impressionists their name.
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Hoschedé purchased the work for 800 francs in 1874, only to sell it at a loss, four years later, for 210 francs.
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Monet had moved into Le Pressoir with Alice, his own two boys, and Alice’s children: four girls and two boys. The large clan was notable in Giverny because all of them dressed, as one of them later recalled, “rather haphazardly in loud colors, wearing hats...We were, in the eyes of the villagers, newcomers who were observed with distrust.”
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Yet by 1914, three decades later, matters had changed. Monet was no longer a notorious “wild beast.” He was seventy-three years old. Forty years had passed since the controversial 1874 group exhibition
at which his work had been mocked by the critics. Success and acclaim had come slowly enough, but after Monet arrived in Giverny his quintessentially French scenes—rows of poplars beside the river, the vaporous morning light breaking over the Seine—eventually began attracting the enthusiastic attention of critics and collectors alike. Complaints about his sketchiness and incompetence with a paintbrush disappeared as critics suddenly became sensitive not only to the prototypical Frenchness of his scenes but also to the mysteriously beautiful qualities of his canvases. He was praised as a “powerful poet of nature” whose works “resonate with the mysterious sounds of the universe.”
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In 1889 a reviewer noted that critics who once had nothing but sarcasm and jokes for Monet now “glorify him as one of the most illustrious of men.” In 1909 a critic called him “the greatest painter we possess today,” while the novelist Remy de Gourmont declared: “We stand here in the presence of perhaps the greatest painter who has ever lived.”
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Monet’s old comrade Paul Cézanne had put it more succinctly: “Fuck, he’s simply the best.”
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The Monet-Hoschedé families at Giverny ca. 1892. Clockwise from lower left: Michel Monet, Alice Hoschedé, Claude Monet (
standing
), Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, Marthe Hoschedé, Jean Monet, Jacques Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé (
foreground
), Germaine Hoschedé, Suzanne Hoschedé.

Monet had exchanged notoriety for celebrity. His fame brought journalists flocking to Giverny, which a newspaper dubbed “the Mecca of Impressionism.”
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Even more plentiful were painters, many of them young American students hoping (as a journalist reported) “to catch a glimpse of this god” and to perfect what became known as the “Giverny trick”: painting in bright colors with a prevalence of purple and green.
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Monet condescended to interviews with select journalists but held himself disdainfully aloof from the invasion of young painters. He curtly
rebuffed the attentions of inquisitive Americans and earned himself what a newspaper called “a reputation for savagery.”
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Relations with the American painters were not improved when, in the early 1890s, several of them proposed to Alice’s daughters. “
Sacrebleu!
” he exclaimed after learning that one young American, Theodore Earl Butler, had asked for the hand of Suzanne Hoschedé. “To marry a painter,” he wailed to Alice, “how annoying.”
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He even threatened to move from Giverny to scupper the nuptials, which took place when, bowing to the inevitable, he finally relented. His reputation for unsociability did little to deter the curious. An American woman, daring to approach him, once asked for a paintbrush as a souvenir. “Really,” Monet complained to a friend, “people have the most idiotic ideas.”
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Along with the acclaim came great wealth. Few wealthy and status-conscious Americans could resist finishing their buying trips to Europe without adding a new Monet to their collections. In New York, Louisine Havemeyer, widow of a sugar baron and one of the first Americans to buy a Monet, adorned the Tiffany-designed rooms of her mansion on East Sixty-Sixth Street with twenty-five Monet canvases. A Chicago collector, Bertha Palmer, wife of a department store and real estate tycoon, once bought twenty-five Monets in a single year. But even their collections were dwarfed by that of the art dealer James F. Sutton, founder of the American Art Association, who owned fifty Monet paintings.

In 1912 alone Monet earned 369,000 francs from sales of his works—a vast sum, considering that the average laborer in Paris earned 1,000 francs a year, and that, a few years earlier, the Hope Diamond changed hands for 400,000 francs.
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As a result he was, as a visitor enviously noted, “surrounded by every comfort.”
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By 1905 his fleet of vehicles had been worth 32,000 francs. A year later he added to his collection both a Peugeot and a brand-new four-cylinder Mendelssohn costing 6,600 francs.
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Such was Monet’s passion for speed that the mayor of Giverny was obliged to publish a notice stating that automobiles passing through the village should go no faster than “the speed of a horse at a regular trot.”
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Monet received his first speeding ticket in 1904.
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Claude Monet in his Panhard et Levassor.

Besides a chauffeur, the domestic staff at Giverny included a butler and a cook, as well as a six-strong team of gardeners to look after his flowers, trees and pond. Along with the automobiles, he owned four riverboats. Visitors were struck by his “lordly bearing.”
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Alice, whom he had finally married in 1892, and whom he dressed in Worth gowns, called him, because of his grand airs,
le marquis
.
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YET ALL WAS
not well on that April day in 1914 when Clemenceau arrived in Giverny. According to one of his closest friends, Monet had suffered “the terrible grief that breaks the heart and ravages the mind.”
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Tragedies had indeed befallen Monet: what he called “an endless succession of troubles and anxieties.”
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Worst of all had been Alice’s death from leukemia in 1911. “I am annihilated,” he wrote to a friend in what became a constant refrain.
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A quarter century earlier, in 1886, when it looked as if Alice might return to her husband, he had been distraught: “The painter in me is dead...Work would be impossible
now.”
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But now she truly was gone, and work did indeed become impossible. Two months after her death he wrote to his friend, the sculptor Auguste Rodin: “I ought to be able to work to conquer my grief, but I cannot.”
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A year after her death he wrote to his stepdaughter Germaine: “The painter is dead and what remains is an inconsolable husband.” To another stepdaughter, Blanche, he wrote that his paintings were a “horrible joke.” He declared that he was going to stop painting altogether.
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Work became even more impossible a year after Alice’s death when, in the summer of 1912, he suddenly began losing his eyesight. “Three days ago,” he wrote to a friend, “when I was getting down to work, I made the dreadful discovery that I was no longer able to see anything out of my right eye.”
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It was a terrible blow for someone whose almost preternaturally acute eyesight—what an admiring poet called his “fabulously sensitive retina”
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—was held to be one of the great secrets of his genius. In 1883 a reviewer had claimed that Monet “sees differently from the rest of humanity,” speculating that he was acutely sensitive to colors at the ultra-violet end of the spectrum.
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Cézanne had famously declared: “Monet is only an eye, but, good Lord, what an eye!” To another friend he said that Monet possessed “the most prodigious eye in the history of painting.”
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But now—such was the malice of fate—this phenomenal vision was muddy, bland, indistinct. A cataract was diagnosed soon afterward. His doctors and friends tried in vain to reassure him that he was in no danger of going blind, but Monet’s deep pessimism and sullen depression remained. Shortly after his diagnosis, a violent thunderstorm pummeled the village. “In Giverny,” a newspaper solemnly reported, “the property of the famous painter Claude Monet was destroyed.”
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Repairs were duly made, but a year later, in the summer of 1913,
Gil Blas
reported that “the great Monet” had decided, once and for all, to retire his paintbrushes.
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Then yet more sorrow. In February 1914 his son Jean died at the age of forty-six. Jean Monet had been the child of his impecunious, struggling youth, born to his model (later his first wife) Camille Doncieux. The infant Jean appeared in many of Monet’s early paintings: asleep with a doll in his cradle, sitting at the table during a family luncheon, riding a “horse tricycle,” or sprawled on the grass with his mother in the garden.
In the summer of 1912 he suffered a stroke, possibly the result of syphilis. A year later, increasingly incapacitated, Jean was forced to move from Beaumont-le-Roger, where he had been operating a trout farm, and into the Villa des Pinsons, a house in Giverny that Monet purchased for him. “What torture for me to witness his decline,” Monet wrote to a friend a few days before, when after much suffering, Jean finally died.
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In 1905 a visitor wrote of Monet, then at the height of his powers: “He constantly seeks new worlds to conquer and nothing seems too difficult.”
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But a decade later it appeared that his conquests had reached an end. This was the Claude Monet—wealthy and celebrated yet listless, despondent and idle—that Georges Clemenceau, in late April 1914, came to Giverny to visit.

CLEMENCEAU AND MONET
had known each other since they were young men in Paris in the 1860s.
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Theirs was, in some respects, an unlikely friendship. Monet claimed his only two interests in life were painting and gardening. He certainly had little interest in politics, never even bothering to cast his vote.
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Clemenceau, on the other hand, had many interests and many talents, chief among them politics. In 1914 he was both a member of the Senate and the editor of a daily newspaper,
L’Homme Libre
, for which he wrote lengthy and forthright editorials. He was absolutely irrepressible, a bustling and seemingly unconquerable force of nature. Monet, by contrast, was volatile, insecure, and prone to petulance, frustration, and despair. There were, nonetheless, strong similarities: pride, stubbornness, passion, a vigorous youthfulness that belied their years, and what a mutual friend, referring to Monet, called “an invincible force that was not merely physical.”
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