The misty pale greens, warm yellows, mauves and rosy pinks of this almost-abstract oil painting 13 feet wide and 6 and a half tall glow invitingly. It’s hung low, in a simple burnished gold-red frame like bamboo pole. Viewed from close to, the encrusted canvas is an amorphous mass of splodged, swirling layers of multi-coloured paint. But with distance, separate shapes begin to emerge. Paradoxically, the further away from the painting we are the more it draws us in – and it’s best appreciated from about 12 feet away, at the bench in the centre of this room. It’s called ‘Water Lilies’, and it was painted after 1916 by Claude Monet.
Eye-shaped areas of dark blue and mauve contain horizontal groupings of greeny-yellow and aquamarine ovals with blobs of red and pink - water-lily leaves and flowers. These contrast with patches of vertical squiggles and smudges in greens, tans and pinks - like indistinct veils. The work divides into three vertical sections slanting gently towards the right. Up each of the left and right sections are three lily groups - one above the other – with blurred areas between. Where on the left side there’s a group, in the corresponding position on the right side is a blurred area – and vice versa, providing a kind of equilibrium. Towards the top the oval leaves are more squashed – hinting at the tilt of the water surface as it recedes from us. The middle vertical section is predominantly pale pink and bounded by bulging mauve forms - suggesting the reflections of trees with a sunrise or sunset sky between. In the centre of this is a particularly smudged area, perhaps where the breeze has ruffled the water. And towards the top right of the work is another – maybe the fleeting movement of a weeping willow. Monet himself said:
Monet (male voice):
The essence of the motif is the mirror of water whose appearance changes at every moment because areas of sky are reflected in it...The passing cloud, the freshening breeze, the seed which is poised and then falls, the wind which blows and then suddenly drops, the light which dims and again brightens – all...transform the colour and disturb the planes of water.
Monet’s lily pond at Giverny was his main subject for the last thirty years of his life. In the many paintings it inspired he explored the relationship between seeing and painting - constantly questioning what looking actually means - and the role of memory in that looking. Monet’s own memory was playing an increasingly important part in his work. About four years before this painting he’d been diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes. But above all Monet said he was determined to convey what he felt. And in order to do that he found himself abandoning the conventions of Western art.
