Although born in Paris, Monet grew up in Le Havre, a port city in Normandy, France, where
his precocious caricatures attracted the attention of the landscape painter Eugène Boudin.
Boudin introduced Monet to the practice of painting en plein air (outdoors), a practice which
informed Monet’s entire career. Although Monet studied with the academician Charles Gleyre
in Paris, he always credited nature as his true master. His great pleasure in the contemplation of
natural beauty and his desire to capture the essence of nature on canvas led him to a completely
new style of painting that would eventually be known as Impressionism.Monet’s harmonious
combination of unmixed colors, smaller and more varied brushstrokes, and masterful studies
in light presented paintings that provided the absorbing pleasure of the immediate impression,
while refusing to be completely legible. After many years of struggle, during which Monet
experienced extreme poverty, he finally achieved much financial, critical, and popular success.
Nearly 70 years old when he completed this canvas, he was still very much in the prime of his
career and still pushing the limits of landscape painting.
Monet purchased his home in Giverny in 1890 and spent the next twelve years planning and
cultivating his flower garden. Thanks to his growing success as an artist, Monet was able to
employ a staff of six gardeners to help him develop a garden paradise complete with elaborate
flower beds, ponds, bridges, and footpaths. Monet’s garden at Giverny served as his primary
subject matter from 1900 until his death in 1926. He completed almost 350 canvases of his
garden, which vary in subject matter and effect.
Monet developed the concept of painting series of pictures with a single motif in 1876,
including famous scenes of a Paris train station, haystacks, and the cathedral at Rouen. His
water lily series began in 1899. There has been much discussion about the purpose of the water
lily paintings. The plan for his “great decorations”—“a cycle of water lily paintings intended as
a gift to the French state”—was conceived in 1916 and occupied Monet in his final decade.
Although Monet always said that the beauty of nature inspired his canvases, critics call his
quasi-abstract water lily paintings masterpieces of rhythmic brushwork and illusion.
Throughout his water lily series, Monet focuses on only one small portion of the pond at
Giverny, eliminating any reference to solid land. The flowers blend into the water, while the
reflections of sky and trees seem almost as tangible as the water lilies themselves. Monet has
created a complex level of illusion by creating a two-dimensional painting of a two-dimensional
surface (water) that reflects a three-dimensional world. Although many of his works were painted
entirely en plein air, his late large canvases of the water lily series were created in a studio built
especially for this purpose in the garden of Giverny.
The notion that Monet spent his last few years at Giverny peacefully painting his beloved
garden is a myth. In fact, Monet was so incredibly ambitious and obsessive about his water
lily series that he is known to have periodically burned or slashed canvases in fits of frustration
and self-doubt.
