Claude Monet

Michel Monet, Giverny
Collection Tériade, France (acquired in 1947; sale: Christie's, New York, 8th November 2000, lot 26)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Basel, Kunsthalle, Impressionisten, 1949, no. 201
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Claude Monet, 1840-1926, 1952, no. 125 (titled Champs d'iris)
Yamaguchi, The Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, Claude Monet, 2001, no. 54, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Gaston Bachelard, "Les Nymphéas ou les surprises d'une aube d'été", in Verve, vol. VII, nos. 27 & 28, Paris, 1952, p. 62, illustrated in colour (titled Le Champ d'iris)
Denis Rouart, Jean-Dominique Rey and Robert Maillard, Monet Nymphéas, ou les miroirs du temps, Paris, 1972, p. 189, illustrated
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 1899-1926, Lausanne and Paris, 1985, vol. IV, p. 265, no. 1825, illustrated
Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, Catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. IV, p. 865, no. 1825, illustrated

After a period of relative inactivity following the death of his eldest son Jean, in the early summer of 1914 Monet was back at work, and it was at this time that a radical shift in scale occurred in his painting. He returned to his favourite subject of the flowers and pond of his garden at Giverny, this time on a monumental scale, the canvases measuring between one and two meters in height. Alongside the famous water lilies, during this period Monet executed a series of paintings depicting the colourful irises that grew in large tufts at the edge of the water.

Writing about Monet’s celebrated garden at Giverny, that inspired so many of his masterpieces throughout his career, Stephan Koja commented: "The design of his garden was Monet’s second great passion in life. He had already put a great deal of work into his gardens, both at Giverny and Vétheuil, making sure that there was always some colour in them. The Giverny garden, which soon became famous, bore witness to his predilection for blue flowers, particularly irises. […] Immediately after buying Giverny, Monet did away with the existing fruit and vegetable garden in front of the house and replaced it with a flower garden laid out in accordance with purely aesthetic considerations. […] The garden thus became a veritable work of art – one whose masses of flowers presented an ever-changing spectacle, because it was planted so as to produce a spectacular succession of colours" (S. Koja, Claude Monet, New York, 1996, p. 142).

Georges Truffaut, a gardening expert who made numerous visits to Monet’s garden in Giverny, wrote about the artist’s passion for irises in an article for a gardening magazine: "The edges of the pond are thickly covered with irises of every kind. In the spring, there are Iris sibirica and Virginian irises with their long petals and velvety texture; later on the Japanese irises and the Kaempferi irises grow here" (G. Truffaut, "Le Jardin de Cl. Monet", in Jardinage, no. 87, November 1924, quoted in D. Wildenstein, op. cit., 1996, p. 864). Truffaut compared Monet’s garden to a firework display, and admired Monet’s truly artistic floral decorations "whose glorious colours surpass the imagination" (ibid.).

The present work, showing yellow and purple irises against a background of blue and green hues, is executed in bold, free brushstrokes characteristic of Monet’s mature style. He treats the canvas as a two-dimensional plane, on which patches of pigment acquire a near-abstract quality. Using this technique, the artist challenges the traditional spatial perspective of a painting, and disregards the notions of foreground and background. All areas of the canvas thus become equally important, reflecting the artist’s delight in the decorative value of colour, free of any illusion of space and perspective. It was Monet’s passion for colour that imbued both his art and his garden design, and the two come together in the present work in a glorious display of the artist’s truly avant-garde vision.

Fig. 1, Claude Monet, Iris, circa 1914-17, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

Fig. 2, Claude Monet, Le Chemin dans les iris, circa 1914-17, oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London

Fig. 3, Vincent Van Gogh, Irises, 1889, oil on canvas, J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California