UNIT 4
Water Lilies
Claude Monet (1840-1926) gave the Impressionist movement its name and was one of its most successful and best-known artists. Before Impressionism was fashionable or accepted by the artistic elite, Monet was on the forefront of this revolutionary style. Paintings such as Impression Sunrise and La Gare Saint-Lazare exemplify the Impressionist style, with their hazy portrayals of light, air, and motion, allowing the essential elements of the work to shine through. These works drew harsh criticism from many of Monet's contemporaries, but some realized that Monet was exploring a whole new way to paint.
Throughout Monet's life, his paintings focused on outdoor scenes, be they landscapes featuring the Seine river, haystacks in the fading sun, close-ups of blue-green water lilies, or even a portrayal of turkeys in a field. Many themes captured Monet's artistic attention, but nature was always his primary inspiration.
When in 1899 he began painting his “Water-lilies”, his point of departure was still nature. The water garden, which he designed himself in his property at Gwerny, provided him with the subject. If, at the beginning, objects are still easily identifiable, the vegetation of the pond and on its banks, the water-lilies, the weeping willows later take on vague shapes and the paintings show us above all blobs, trails, flourishness and tangles of colour which have a strong tendency to be sufficient in themselves.
Claude Monet produced more than 40 panels as he worked on The Grandes Decorations. He generally conceived the panels in groups of three or four with shared motifs and light effects.
In this panel of the 1920-26 Water Lily Pond, the lilies float out of the reeds toward the center of the pond. A subtle play of light enhances this sense of motion, intensifying from the cool shadows at the right to the warmer illumination near the top left of the composition.