retreat to the garden--2/14/25

14 Feb 2025

retreat to the garden--2/14/25

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Today's selection--from Monet by Jackie Wullschläger. One of Monet’s final painting series, Mornings on the Seine.

“Unsettled by the wedding, Monet sought solitude after it. Every morning through summer 1897 he slipped out of the house while the family slept, and at 3:30 a.m. painted light breaking through dawn fog on a secluded inlet, overhung by tall trees, where the Epte enters the main river. In this protected space, the mist hung in thin veils, muffling colour and sound. For Mornings on the Seine, his final series paintings to be shown in the 1890s, Monet did not want heroics. He said he chose ‘an easier subject and simpler lighting than usual’ and returned to his old, consoling love, the river.

“He had attempted this series in 1896, but poor weather dashed progress. The sustained effort in 1897 was, Monet felt, significant enough to be documented. Dragged awake at what is a journalist's bedtime, Maurice Guillemot of La Revue illustrée, at the crack of dawn,’ followed Monet,

'his torso snug in a white woollen hand-kit, his feet in a pair of sturdy hunting boots with thick, dew-proof soles, his head covered by a pic turesque, battered, brown felt hat with the brim turned down to keep off the sun, a cigarette in his mouth ... he pushes open the door, walks down the steps, follows the central path through his garden ... crosses the road (at this hour deserted) ... skirts the pond mottled with water lilies, steps over the brook lapping against the willows, plunges into the mist-dimmed meadows, and comes to the river. There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes, reaches the large punt at anchor which serves as his studio.'

Morning on the Seine near Giverny

“Painting from the water, Monet wrought symmetrical patterns from arabesques of foliage mirrored in the still pools, nebulous in the weak light, more defined, with deeper shadows, as the day brightened. The Mornings on the Seine are as soothing and smoothly blended as the Cathedrals are confrontational and intricate. Tonal paintings in a restricted pale pink to blue-violet range, they are Monet's meditative homage to the river. Julie Manet was surely right when she observed, ‘his Seine series seemed very sad to me.’

“Within the context of his overarching confidence, Monet was not Monet without the self-doubt that came picture by picture. ‘I am by nature always inclined to find what I've done bad,’ he said. This was acute throughout 1897: ‘more than ever I doubt myself ... it's the powerlessness that comes with age.’ There was one exception. In August, Monet worked for a month on ‘a big study with a view to a decoration. This thrills me and gives me back my former ardour.’ This is the first mention of the large ‘decoration’ that would eventually become the Water Lilies series. Although they have precursors—the reflections in the pond at Montgeron in 1876, and compositionally the ice floes spangled across the river in the Vetheuil paintings of 1879-80—it is notable that at his impasse a year before, in 1896, Monet had re-encountered and championed Morisot's swirling decorative panel Venus and her watery Two Nymphs.

“Monet talked about ‘models for a decoration’ to Guillemot, who asked his readers to ‘imagine a circular room in which the dado beneath the moulding is covered with [paintings of] water, dotted with these plants to the very horizon, walls of a transparency alternately green and mauve, the calm and silence of the still waters reflecting the opened blossoms.’ Eight experimental water-lily canvases from 1897 survive; they are rather heavy and airless, and the pond then was anyway not fully developed. A parallel innovative endeavour, very successful, was a quartet of large close-ups of chrysanthemums, the pink, gold and red heads painted flat, with no horizon, pictorial space collapsed in favour of all-over compositions, which anticipate the patterned surfaces of the water-lily paintings. These fascinated Monet.

“After the Seine series, the Chrysanthemums were the only pictures he completed during 1897. Giverny, Guillemot explained, ‘represents an ambience which the painter had arranged for himself ... During periods of inactivity—he can go for months without doing a thing he continues his work, without appearing to, if only by going out for a walk; his eye contemplates, studies and stores.’ For two years Monet did this, waiting to set down the water garden on canvas. Then he depicted his garden as a haven from disturbances outside which, between 1897 and 1899, were too loud to ignore.”