Monet is remembered for light, fog and water lilies, and for pictures that look as if they were painted in a few happy hours. Several of the twelve below were painted while his family had no bread, or while a village fought him over a pond. The light on these canvases is what everyone sees. The circumstances behind it are less well known.
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How These Were Chosen
Monet worked outdoors whenever he could, facing the motif. He laid down short strokes fast enough to catch the light, the mist or the wind before they changed, and he left those strokes visible on the canvas.
Later he went back to the same motif again and again, in series, because the light was never the same twice. The subject is often ordinary, a field, a pond, the front of a church, and the weather becomes the picture.
The twelve paintings here follow him from his twenties, when the Salon jury turned him away, to the huge canvases of his last years. Each one is tied to a real place, a precise season and the life he was living there.
12. Claude Monet, Water Lilies: Setting Sun (1914 to 1926)
There is no sky in Setting Sun, only water. Lily pads drift on the pond, tall grasses rise among them in curved strokes of green and brown, and a patch of yellow light falls on the reeds. Claude Monet worked on this panel from 1914 to 1926, and it is huge: 2 meters high and 6 meters long.
A panel that size needed a room of its own. In 1916 Monet built a studio in his garden at Giverny, lit from the ceiling, so that he could paint canvases this large indoors.
The panels soon found a purpose. On 12 November 1918, one day after the Armistice, Monet wrote to Georges Clemenceau, France's prime minister, who had known him since the 1860s. He was finishing two decorative panels that he wanted "to sign on the day of Victory," and he asked Clemenceau to offer them to the State.
Clemenceau wanted more than two. He talked Monet into giving the whole cycle, and the deed signed on 12 April 1922 covered nineteen panels.
Monet then nearly took the gift back. On 19 March 1925 he wrote to the director of Fine Arts that he was thinking of destroying the panels, and he offered to repay the State with paintings by Cézanne and others from his own collection.
Clemenceau kept coming back to the studio. In his book on the Water Lilies, published in 1928, he quotes Monet's answer: as long as he lived, the panels would not leave Giverny. "I have given my canvases to my country," Monet told him.
The promise held. Monet died at 86, in December 1926, and on 17 May 1927 Clemenceau opened the two oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. The rooms follow Monet's plan, with the morning scenes on the east and this evening one on the west wall of the first room.
At a Glance
Artist: Claude Monet (1840 to 1926)
Painted: 1914 to 1926
Medium: Oil on canvas, mounted on the wall
Size: 200 × 600 cm (79 × 236 in)
Where to see it: Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
11. Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament, London (1904)
The towers of Westminster rise above the Thames as a single dark violet mass, and the fog gives the sky and the river the same mauve and orange. Only one small boat in the foreground, with a man standing in it, keeps a clear outline. Yet Claude Monet signed and dated this canvas in 1904, three years after he had last stood in front of the river.