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Water Lilies by Monet

Sunday, October 4th 2020

Water Lilies by Monet

Claude MONET (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926)

Les Nymphéas (fragment).

Canvas.

Height. 42.7 Width. 46.7 cm.
(restorations).

Provenance:
- succession Michel Monet ; given to the Blin family, Claude Monet's gardener ;
- by descent, Gérard Blin, Giverny;
- collection Patrick Dumont, comrade of Gérard Blin, Eure;
- private collection, Val d'Oise.

A fragment of the Nympheas by Claude Monet offered to his gardener.

Claude Monet's fragments are not the subject of inclusion notices from the Wildenstein Platner Institute but are kept in the archives of this institution as an informative document.

The Water Lilies cycle is probably Claude Monet's most famous series. The father of Impressionism delivered, in front of his water lily pond in Giverny, an evolutionary painting: an art of the ephemeral that anticipates abstraction. Among these canvases, invariably two meters high, those kept at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris offer an unforgettable panorama. However, Monet is sometimes hesitant, confronted with the difficulty of representing the impression that "water with grass in the background [...] it's admirable to see, but it drives you crazy to want to do that. These other canvases that he lacerated and sometimes threw away have sometimes escaped destruction. Recovered by his daughter-in-law, or sometimes used as wall decorations by his gardener Eugène Blin, a few relics of the Water Lilies still remain.

On the death of Michel Monet, the painter's son, the Blin family had the usufruct of the house in Giverny and received these paintings. The fragment that we present belonged to a comrade of Gerard Blin, the son of the painter's gardener, as their school principal testifies in an autograph letter. It is to be compared with another fragment exhibited in 1992 at the Stadthalle in Balingen during the exhibition "Claude Monet" (n°32), then sold in Paris on November 21, 2011 (Me Millon, n°63). These water lily leaves placed on the water illuminate us like a beacon of Art history, symbolically safeguarded by the one who was in charge of taking care of the subject of this cycle.
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