'The Water Lilies'

Among the most memorable and well-known works ever created by Claude Monet, the great co-founder of French Impressionism, are his Water Lilies. In 1914, near the end of his life, at the age of 73, Monet began 'The  Water Lilies series'. 'The Water Lilies series' marked a highly significant moment in Claude Monet's career and involved a huge number of paintings and drawings from around the artist's garden.  Perhaps there is no work of art more distinctive or enchanting than Monet's  Water Lilies series, or Les Nymphéas.

It's incredible to think that 'the Water Lilies series' might not ever have been created at all had the local town council had their way. In spite of the continuing protests of his neighbours, Monet completed his water gardens and a small pond. And in 1899, constructed a Japanese style bridge to go across it, which was the subject of 17 different painting that very same year. Each painting portrays the bridge in different lighting, immersed in a variety of different weather patterns. Each one capturing the structure in a specific moment in time. The element to his career that we remember most is probably the way in which he studied the same objects many times over, but within different environmental conditions across each iteration.  The emphasis in his pictures shifted from representing figures to depicting different qualities of light and atmosphere in each scene. Monet experimented with loose handling, bold color, and strikingly unconventional compositions departing from the clear depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the established art of the time, 

As the storm of WWI raged around him in Europe, Monet sat near his water gardens, painting his aquatic plants in various states of bloom, his Japanese-style bridge, and the long hanging willow branches, reaching for the pond waters below. These paintings, which Monet referred to as his 'water landscapes' became the focus of his entire life, spending much of his last 30 years alive working diligently on them, not even slowing down when his eyesight began to weaken due to the onset of cataracts in 1912. 

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In his mid 60s, Monet started to develop bilateral age-related cataracts (or nuclear sclerosis), which would eventually affect his work dramatically. His painting noticeably lost subtlety. Brush strokes became bolder. His images lost detail and flowed into one another. Compared with Monet’s earlier paintings, with their direct transcriptions of the countryside, the water lilies dispense with contours and boundaries and veer toward abstraction. Although Monet’s late works, 'The Water Lilies series', were the result of cataracts and not conscious experimentation with a more expressionistic style, it is his late works, created under the influence of his cataracts, that link impressionism with modern abstract art. 

It’s hard to imagine today, but Monet’s large water-lily panels, which he himself installed in 1927 in the Orangerie and are today worshipped in this “Sistine Chapel of Impressionism,” were deemed “devastatingly dull” and a “grave artistic error” by the critics at the time. The scornful voices of his critics brought darkness into the life of Claude Monet. Feeling alone, criticized, and forgotten, Monet's self confidence was shattered. Many of the younger artists and critics were now enamoured with the more current avant-garde art scene, finding the works of the Impressionists to be passé while artists such as  Picasso were more exciting and of the moment.

Sadly, this emotional turmoil lead to the destruction of several finished paintings that no one aside from the artist has ever laid eyes upon. Monet destroyed each one out of frustration that they had not achieved what he intended. His work was neglected and his house and garden in Giverny falling apart until he was “rediscovered” in 1952 when the war-damaged Orangerie was reopened.