How To Read Paintings: Monet’s Water Lilies
Amorphous and puzzling paintings that gain more meaning by looking
When standing in front of a water lily painting by Claude Monet, you have the sense that a moment of magic is about to take place. Here is a painting that is many feet wide and six feet high, an expanse of misty, vibrating colour that fills your field of vision.
Somewhere in the meeting place between your eyes and the picture surface, a discovery is taking place. The magic of these pictures — and why they are so beguiling too — is that the encounter unfolds, repeats, returns and spirals like a piece of music.
Monet produced around 250 paintings based on the water lilies that were growing on the pond at his home in Giverny, a town in northern France where the artist lived for the last 40 years of his life.
Monet had long appreciated the value of working in ‘series’. His practice of painting the same subject again and again, had yielded one of the greatest achievements of Impressionist art: that the fleeting effects of light and changing weather conditions could be registered as an aesthetic insight. To compare and…
