Description
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) Pont dans le jardin de Monet signed and dated "Claude Monet 1900" (lower left) oil on canvas 34 5/8 x 36 1/8 in. (89 x 92 cm) painted in 1895-1896 estimate: $6,500,000-8,500,000 Provenance Paul Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired directly from the artist, October 1911) P. Esterez (acquired from the above in 1913) Leopold Ullstein Arthur Kauffmann, London (acquired from the above in 1947; sale: Sotheby's, London, December 4, 1984, lot 8) Anon. sale: Sotheby's, New York, May 11, 1987, lot 48 Berry Hill Galleries, Inc., New York (acquired at the above sale) Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above; sale: Christie's, New York, May 12, 1999, lot 21) Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited Vienna, Galerie Arnot, Französische Impressionisten, 1911, no. 11 Zurich, Kunsthaus, Ausstellung Französische Kunst, February-March, 1913, p. 28, no. 165 (as Brücke im Garten des Künstlers) Basel, Kunstmuseum, Claude Monet: Nymphéas, Impression-Vision, July-October 1986, p. 171, no. 2 (illustrated in color, p. 19) Treviso, Casa dei Carraresi, Monet, I luoghi della pittura, September 29, 2001-February 10, 2002, p. 389, no. 65 (illustrated in color, pp. 272 and 389) Literature Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l'Impressionnisme, Paris and New York, 1939, vol. 1, p. 429 Denis Rouart, Jean-Dominique Rey, and Robert Maillard, Monet "Nymphéas," Paris, 1972, p. 154 (illustrated) Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne, 1974, vol. II, p. 192, no. 1419bis (illustrated, p. 193) Marianne Alphant, Claude Monet, une vie dans le paysage, Paris, 1993, p. 576 Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection, The Modernist Myth of the Self, Chicago, 1994, p. 129 (illustrated, fig. 70) Paul Hayes Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 235, no. 8 Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. III, p. 588, no. 1419a (illustrated in color, p. 587) Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1999, p. 18 (illustrated in color, fig. 17) V. Spate and D. Bromfield, Monet & Japan, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2001, p. 51 Widely hailed as landmarks of late Impressionism, the paintings that Monet made of his gardens at Giverny constitute some of the most compelling and inventive works of his entire career. As Paul Tucker has written, "They stand as eloquent witness to an aging artist's irrepressible urge to express his feelings in front of nature...[and] also attest to his persistent desire to reinvent the look of landscape art and to leave a legacy of significance" (P.H. Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century, op. cit., p. 14). During the last 25 years of his life, Monet devoted himself almost single-mindedly to depicting the flower garden and lily pond that he had fashioned at Giverny, producing an astonishingly complex and diverse group of around 300 canvases. As one of the very first pictures in this exceptional series, the present painting occupies a position of seminal importance in Monet's oeuvre. The artist and his family moved to Giverny in April of 1883. Situated at the confluence of the Seine and the Epte, about 40 miles northwest of Paris, Giverny was at the time a quiet, picturesque farming community of just 279 residents. Upon his arrival there, Monet rented a large, pink stucco house on two acres of land that the former inhabitants had used for a kitchen garden and orchard. When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet purchased it at the asking price of 22,000 francs - "certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside," as he explained to Durand-Ruel (W1079) - and immediately began tearing up the kitchen garden to make an elaborate flower garden. Three years later, he acquired an adjacent plot of land and applied to the local government for permission "to install a prise d'eau in order to provide enough water to fresh the pond that I am going to dig...for the purpose of cultivating aquatic plants" (W1191). By autumn of 1893, Monet had converted nearly 1,000 square meters into a lavish lily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge and ringed by an artful arrangement of flowers, trees, and bushes. In its finished form, the water garden was nothing short of magical; as one visitor reported: "You enter the aquatic garden over an arched bridge covered with wisteria in June - the fragrance is so heavy that it is like going through a pipe of vanilla. The clusters of white and mauve...fall like fanciful grapes in the water, and the passing breeze harvests the aroma..." (quoted in R. Gordon and A. Forge, Monet, New York, 1988, p. 213). The mysterious and contemplative aquatic garden formed an apt contrast to the more traditional flower garden near the house. With its fanciful layout and reflective pools, the water garden was unmistakably eastern in inspiration, a feature that Monet accentuated by planting bamboo, ginkgo trees, and Japanese fruit trees around the pond. The arched footbridge, moreover, is closely related to structures depicted in Japanese prints, such as Hiroshige's color woodcut Wisteria at Drum Bridge from the series A 100 Famous Places in Yedo (fig. 1). The eastern flavor of the water garden was far from accidental. Monet was an avid collector of Japanese prints, and praised the Japanese in a 1904 interview as "a profoundly artistic people" (quoted in P.H. Tucker, Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989, p. 264). An enthusiastic gardener all his life, Monet felt particular affinity for the deep engagement with the natural world that distinguished Japanese culture. As the artist himself repeatedly insisted, "What I need most of all are flowers, always, always" (quoted in R. Gordon and A. Forge, op. cit., p. 199). The gardens at Giverny, however, were created not only to fulfill Monet's passion for nature, but also to provide the painter with artistic motifs. In his petition to the Préfet de l'Eure for permission to build the lily pond, Monet specified that it would serve "for the pleasure of the eyes and also for the purpose of having subjects to paint" (W1191). Critics, too, repeatedly commented on the painterly quality of Monet's gardens. Marcel Proust, for instance, wrote, "If...I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colors and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a color garden, so to speak..." (quoted in C. Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 250). And Arsène Alexandre made a similar point: "Here is a painter who, in our own time, has multiplied the harmonies of color, has gone as far as one person can into the subtlety, opulence, and resonance of color... Who inspired all this? His flowers. Who was his teacher? His garden..." (quoted in ibid., p. 223). Nonetheless, in the years before 1897, Monet made only three paintings of his water garden and none at all of his flower garden. It is possible that he was waiting for his plantings to mature, or that he was merely preoccupied with other series. All three of the early canvases depict the same view, looking across the pond toward the Japanese bridge; one shows the scene in winter (Wildenstein no. 1392), the other two in spring or summer (the present work and Wildenstein no. 1419). There are no lilies on the surface of the water, and the weeping willow that is so prominent in later works (fig. 2) is not yet in evidence. Clusters of dainty yellow irises, however, already ring the pond, skirting the narrow footpath that would eventually be obscured by a dense growth of pampas grass. The pictures are crucial documents of an early stage in the development of the lily pond, as well as evocative landscapes in their own right. In the present example, the play of reflections is especially nuanced and lovely, the gentle arc of the bridge mirrored in the still waters and the reflections of trees and sky assuming independent shapes. The double image of the bridge serves both to organize space and to announce a human presence in this serene aquatic enclave, designating the pond as a site for contemplation and meditation. The dating of these three early pictures is problematic. In a 1918 letter to Durand-Ruel, Monet recalled that the winter scene had been painted in January 1895, during the first severe frost of the season (see L. Venturi, Les archives de l'impressionnisme, Paris, 1939, vol. I, p. 450). The other two paintings were probably made in the same year or the year after, and were later inscribed with anomalous dates. Wildenstein Letter no. 1419 is dated 1892, the year before Monet purchased the land for the water garden; the present painting is dated 1900, when the lilies and other plantings would already have been flourishing. The journalist Maurice Guillemot reported seeing lilies on the surface of the pond during a visit to Giverny in the summer of 1897, suggesting that the two early canvases were painted before this time. Between 1899 and the end of his life, Monet made at least 44 more paintings of the lily pond and the Japanese bridge (Wildenstein nos. 1509-1520, 1628-1633, 1668-1670, and 1911-1933). Well over half of these are housed today in major museum collections, including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
