Monet's Pond – In the Shade of the Foliage

In 1994, Hiramatsu Reiji discovered the Grand Decorations by Claude Monet at the Musée de l’Orangerie. He then decided to go to Giverny to visit the house and garden of the master of French Impressionism: "I was seized with a violent emotion. I thought that if you folded these canvases across you would end up with screens. I wondered what could have possibly prompted Monet to choose the pond, the water lilies […] as a motif for such large-format paintings. So I decided to travel to Giverny to solve this puzzle. I walked around the pond many times and suddenly I realized that Monet had purposefully given it the shape of a hand mirror, which was so popular in Japanese women during the Edo period." (The words of Hiramatsu Reiji recorded by Brigitte Koyama-Richard, 'Hiramatsu Reiji, l’hommage d’un peintre de nihonga à Claude Monet', Hiramatsu, le bassin aux nymphéas. Hommage à Monet, cat. exp., Giverny, musée des impressionnismes, Gand, Éditions Snoeck, 2013, p. 26). From then on, landscapes showing water and reflections became one of his favorite motifs. The artist tried his hand at new formats, adopting the tondo used by Monet in 1907 and 1908.
In 1909, the critic Roger Marx analyzed the changes made in Monet's work: "No more earth, no more sky, no more boundaries now; the motionless, fertile wave covers the whole of the canvas, uninhibited; the light pours out, playing cheerfully on that surface, liberally strewn with foliage the color of verdigris; the water lilies rise out from the canvas, a vision of splendor, and stretch their white, pink, yellow, or blue corollas toward the sky, eager for air and sunshine. Here, the painter has deliberately disobeyed the tutelage of Western tradition; he has not looked for lines that converge or which focus the eye on a specific point; for him, all things fixed and immutable are, by their nature, a contradiction of the very principle of fluidity; he wanted the viewer's attention to be scattered and spread across the whole."(Roger Marx, 'Les Nymphéas de M. Claude Monet', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, June 1909, p. 525–526).

Vanessa Lecomte