Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (9 page)

The difficulty of painting these “impossible things”—of capturing not only the fleeting shadows and surface reflections but also the murky, half-hidden depths of trembling vegetation—was one of the things that drove Monet to despair. His success when the paintings were finally exhibited in 1909 was the result of a sophisticated technique of applying his paints.
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Monet was not, as Cézanne had claimed, “only an eye,” for his incredible acuity of vision was combined with an equally adroit hand capable of subtle but masterful techniques. The painter André Masson—himself a master of spontaneous applications of paint—later rhapsodized over Monet’s “touch of many accents: crisscrossed, ruffled, speckled. You have to see it in close-up. What a frenzy!” His brushwork was, Masson declared, “the wildest whirlwind.”
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Close examination of these waterscapes reveals a magnificently varied technique. Monet chose canvases with a pronounced weave, one whose weft threads were thicker than the warp. He then applied a series of undercoats, allowing each one to dry before adding the next. He brushed his paint at right angles to the weft so that its threads trapped
more of the pigment, creating a series of corrugations and giving the canvas what has been called a “textural vibration.”
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In other words, he used his pigments and the texture of the canvas to suggest both the ripples of water on the surface and, in the declivities marked by the warp threads, the underlying depths. Paradoxically for a man who wished to give the impression of the spontaneous capture of a fleeting moment in time, he sometimes used a dozen or more layers of paint on a canvas. He often scraped off one or two layers, leaving behind an uneven texture to further enhance the shimmering appearance of the subsequent applications.
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This sort of brushwork was a virtuoso performance, especially in combination with how Monet composed his scenes. Many of his earliest paintings of his water garden, such as those of his Japanese bridge done in the late 1890s, showed a traditional perspective. The landscape receded from the foreground, which was composed of water and floating water lilies, and into a middle ground, across which the Japanese bridge gracefully arched. In the background was the distant bank with its lush vegetation, and in some of the paintings, a snatch of sky. But gradually water, land, and sky began to blend and exchange places, or even disappear entirely as, standing beside the pond, Monet lowered his gaze to focus with increasing intensity on the water. By 1904 the sky was cropped from his views of the pond. It appeared only in reflection, with the expanse of water bordered at the top of the canvas by the opposite bank. A year later, the opposite bank disappeared as Monet concentrated on the surface of the water, whose reflections were interrupted by the shimmering archipelagoes of lily pads. The view became even more dizzyingly confusing in 1907—Monet’s frustrating annus horribilis—as he rotated his canvases 90 degrees and began painting views that were taller than they were wide. Water lilies were strewn across murky reflections of willow trees, while a gap of mirrored sky in various hues occupied the center of the painting.

One of the critics in 1909, Louis Gillet, noted what was remarkable about these waterscapes: they were “upside-down paintings” because the sky was at the bottom and the landscape—present only
in the topsy-turvy reflections of willows and other foliage—at the top. Landscape painting had been turned on its head. There was no firm mooring for the viewer, only a vertiginous gaze into what Gillet called “a mirror without a frame”
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—a mirror that offered an inverted view of the world and the half-hidden depths beneath. The viewer was left with no perspective and little means of gauging space or distance. Land, trees, and sky had all disappeared, glimpsed only in streaky reflections agitated by the breeze, set ablaze by the sun or dimmed by the falling day. The only solid forms left were the blurry clusters of water lilies with their bright pinpricks of color. As the reviewer for the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
exclaimed, no one had ever painted like this before. Little wonder that, in the midst of these discombobulating visions, Monet should briefly have turned to painting baskets of eggs.
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Louis Gillet made another point about Monet’s 1909 waterscapes. What made these scenes so innovative, he suggested, was their abstraction. Indeed, he declared that “the pure abstraction of art can go no further.”
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Monet may have protested that his art was not an abstraction from nature but, rather, an attempt to reproduce it as faithfully as possible—indeed, with an almost fanatical attention to visual evidence, however transient. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé later claimed that Monet never worked “abstractly.”
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However, critics such as Gillet, as well as certain avant-garde painters, saw things differently. For them, Monet’s delicious formal qualities—the shimmering brushstrokes and fields of harmonized color—had liberated themselves from any mundane descriptive function. That is, a realistic depiction of the pond was far less important than both the formal means through which it was conveyed and the emotions that these mesmerizing swipes of color evoked in the viewer. If Monet had been written off by some critics as an irrelevance, Gillet’s claim about “pure abstraction” placed him, in 1909, at the forefront of modern art.

THE GREAT SUCCESS
of Monet’s 1909 exhibition led to calls for the forty-eight paintings to be kept together as part of a decorative ensemble. The appeal was similar to the one that Clemenceau had made in
1895 regarding the Rouen Cathedral paintings, when he urged the government—to no avail—to purchase the collection and keep it intact. Monet himself wrote a letter to Geffroy expressing his desire to have his water lily paintings decorate a room, creating a “flowery aquarium” in which the owner could relax and restore himself. He envisaged the canvases “covering the walls, unifying them, giving the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no bank.”
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The press adopted this ambition, with journalists from at least five newspapers appealing for someone to come forward and purchase the works, thereby re-creating and preserving the immersive experience enjoyed by visitors to the Galerie Durand-Ruel. “Will the millionaire who is needed read these lines?” asked one newspaper.
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It should not have been difficult to find a millionaire in need of some tranquil yet bewitching interior decoration. Large-scale paintings for private homes had been all the rage in Paris for the previous few decades, with artists such as Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis adorning the salons, studies, and dining rooms of wealthy plutocrats with canvases specially commissioned to create decorative ensembles. Denis claimed in 1903 that the word
décoratif
was the “
tarte à la crème
,” or watchword, among young French painters.
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Three years later, a French critic argued that the greatness of a work of art must not be denied simply on the grounds that “it could be of some use or ornament in our homes” and he noted that the annual Paris Salon, with numerous decorative murals on display, was beginning to look more and more like “a veritable furnished apartment.”
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Monet already had some experience of his own creating pictorial ensembles in domestic spaces. In the late 1870s he executed at least four landscapes on canvases almost six feet high and six feet wide to embellish the wood-paneled grand salon of Ernest Hoschedé’s country home, the Château de Rottembourg. These works featured the grounds of Hoschedé’s magnificent estate: a rose garden, a shimmering pond, a flock of turkeys glowing whitely on the lawn. They were never installed due to bankruptcy proceedings against Hoschedé (whose wife soon decamped with Monet). But a few years later the artist painted thirty-six
panels of varying sizes to adorn the doors in Paul Durand-Ruel’s Paris apartment using his garden at Giverny for inspiration.

In 1909, however, no millionaire stepped forward to rescue the collection of water lily paintings. “Never again,” lamented
Le Gaulois
, Paris’s biggest-selling morning newspaper, “nowhere else, will anyone see them grouped as we see them now. They will scatter to the four corners of the earth, all of them exquisite, but each one yielding only a part of the secret of them all.”
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The comment may have exasperated Monet and his supporters, given that the proprietor of
Le Gaulois
, Gabriel Thomas, had just paid Maurice Denis to decorate the dining room of his pink-bricked mansion in Meudon, Les Capucins, with pastoral scenes inspired by his garden.

The prophecy that the paintings would be dispersed was fulfilled soon enough. The critic for the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
pointed out that several of the paintings were going to “eager America, which is forever stealing our masterpieces.”
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As early as 1889 a reviewer feared that the “rapacity of the Yankees” might mean that Monet’s best works would go to the United States
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—a fear that seemed very real when, two years later, Bertha Palmer’s European shopping spree saw her return to Chicago with twenty-five Monets. The transatlantic flight of Monet’s works continued in 1909. Two of the water lily paintings were bought from the exhibition by Alexander Cochrane, a chemical manufacturer, to grace the Boston mansion built for him by Stanford White. Other buyers of the canvases included Hunt Henderson, a New Orleans sugar baron, and Cornelius Newton Bliss, a former secretary of the interior, a wall in whose mansion on East Thirty-Seventh Street in New York already displayed one of Monet’s Étretat paintings. The Worcester Art Museum bought one on the advice of Desmond FitzGerald, a Brookline-based hydraulic engineer and inveterate Monet collector. Another went to Katherine Toll, the widow of a prominent Colorado lawyer. Still another would join the bountiful collection of Monets in the home in Naugatuck, Connecticut—also built by Stanford White—of the iron manufacturer Harris Whittemore. In 1890, Whittemore had begun collecting Monet so assiduously that his father complained: “We will have more of the
Monets than I think we will care for.”
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Undeterred, Whittemore eventually acquired thirty of his canvases. A discerning collector, he also owned Whistler’s
Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl
, which hung on a staircase landing.

Whatever disappointment Monet experienced with the loss of the opportunity to install a “flowery aquarium” in a domestic setting may have been assuaged by the fact that in 1909 the sales of his paintings amounted to 272,000 francs. But it was this old dream of a complete decorative ensemble—one of the few things that Monet had not yet truly realized—that Clemenceau, with his vision of “a rich Jew,” revived almost five years later.

CHAPTER FOUR

A GREAT PROJECT

MONET’S GUESTS AT
Giverny were often conducted up the stairs and into the master bedroom. Gustave Geffroy called this spacious, light-filled room, with its views of the garden, “the museum of Monet’s most admired companions.”
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The walls featured, among other works, a Degas bather, three Pissarro landscapes, four works by Édouard Manet, and two watercolors by Eugène Delacroix. There were a pair of bronzes by Auguste Rodin and, above the simple bed, a “voluptuously beautiful” Renoir
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and Cézanne’s
Château Noir
. Cézanne had been Monet’s most admired companion of all, and no fewer than fourteen of his paintings hung on the walls of his bedroom and studio. “Yes, Cézanne, he is the greatest of us all,” Monet once declared.
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Whenever his work was not going well, he was forced to drape his Cézannes, unable to work in the presence of such genius. “I felt a pygmy at the foot of a giant,” he once explained.
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The sight of these admired companions meant that Monet enjoyed waking up each morning. He was by long habit an early riser. Whenever he was painting he kept hours with the sun, retiring at dusk and rising at dawn, not even bothering to shutter the bedroom windows. After a bath—always cold, no matter the weather—he descended for breakfast and the first of many cigarettes. He ate a grilled eel or else bacon and eggs, the latter courtesy of the chickens cooped in the garden. Sometimes he enjoyed an English-style breakfast of marmalade on toast and Kardomah tea, delights he had discovered during his stays in London. Sacha Guitry claimed that he also started the day with a glass of white wine, keeping a venerable French working-class tradition.
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Then it was off to work in the open air or, on inclement days, in his studio. A bell at eleven thirty
A.M.
precisely summoned him to lunch, which began with a glass of homemade plum brandy. He was back before his easel two hours later,
working through the afternoon until he was physically exhausted. When in the throes of painting, he had no time for such time-consuming trivialities as getting a haircut, and so the village barber would be summoned to the side of the pond to crop the master’s locks as he painted—though the scissors were forbidden to touch his great tobacco-stained beard.
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