Claude Monet - Mia Feigelson Gallery

12/14/2023

"Garden of the Princess, Louvre", 1867 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

oil on canvas; 91.8 x 61.9 cm (36 1/8 x 24 3/8 in.)
© Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, US
R. T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1948 https://bit.ly/2IIowTt
https://www.facebook.com/allenartmuseum

Dr Andria Derstine, John G.W. Cowles Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, discusses the present work. Watch the Video here http://bit.ly/2q4Xak3

Overview:
"Garden of the Princess was painted from the colonnade of the Louvre in the spring of 1867, at the time of the opening of the Exposition universelle where Japanese art created widespread interest. Garden of the Princess presents random social groupings within a complex urban space, with interwoven trees and buildings.

Monet’s distant Pantheon is sharply defined and the chimney pots in the middle distance are as sharp as the trunks of the regimented rosebushes in the garden below. Monet looked down steeply onto the lawn below the Louvre, representing it as an absolutely flat, unmodulated plane of green paint.

Monet’s selective focus on certain figures — such as the couple or the nursemaid in the garden, or the woman in a pink dress caught by a gleam of light under the trees — gives a sense of human presence within the distantly observed urban crowd. He may have developed this mode of representation from Hiroshige’s witty abbreviated signs for different types of figures — an appropriate vocabulary for the disjointed experience of metropolitan Paris.

The Japanese artist, however, did not have Monet’s facility to use oil paint to suggest the crowd from which individual figures momentarily emerged.

Monet would have seen contemporary photographs of Paris streets taken from high buildings, but these could not have given him the experience of the eye’s active participation in the myriad visual moments of the modern city. He was less interested in the view than in his own visual sensations, high above an animated crowd in central Paris. Japanese prints helped him to embody these sensations." — Find out more https://bit.ly/33pkiYG

11/30/2023

"Olive Tree Wood in the Moreno Garden, Bordighera", 1884 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)


oil on canvas; 65 x 81 cm (25.6 x 31.9 in.)
Private Collection

Context
"Having completed a large commission of decorative panels for the luxurious apartment of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, a project which at times led him to frustration and exasperation, in December 1883 Monet decided to leave Paris and take a trip to the Mediterranean.

He embarked on his journey in January of the following year, and spent three months between Italy, Monaco and France

In 1883, Monet went with Renoir on a brief trip to the Mediterranean. Both painters visited Bordighera on the Italian Riviera, close to the French border.

Monet spent the majority of his Mediterranean journey in Italy, producing a number of views of the town of Bordighera and the surrounding landscape. In a letter to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel he wrote:

'I am certain that I will bring back interesting things, for everywhere all is beauty and the weather is superb' and his Italian views reflect this delight with the rich nature and the unique quality of light in the region. Invigorated by this new environment, Monet worked with a new found energy and produced more than one painting a day.

In 1884, Monet obtained a letter of introduction to a certain M. Moreno, the owner of the 'fabulous' estate in Bordighera. On this estate, which Monet called an earthly paradise, he painted five landscapes.

In a letter to the sculptor Auguste Rodin describing his efforts to translate into paint the brilliant Mediterranean light, Monet declared he was 'fencing, wrestling, with the sun.'

In other letters, he complained of the impossibility of finding a motif due to the abundant vegetation. In this sun-drenched composition painted from a hilltop vantage point, the sea is barely visible through the interlaced trunks of local pine trees." —Find out more https://bit.ly/2G7Ll1Z | Source: The Art Institute of Chicago

11/27/2023

"Antibes, vue du plateau Notre Dame", 1888 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

oil on canvas; 65.1 x 92.1 cm (25 5/8 x 36 3/8 in.)
Private Collection

Overveiw:
"Monet’s dazzling view of the south coast of France, Antibes, vue du plateau Notre-Dame, is one of his most vibrant and brilliantly hued compositions of the 1880s. The azure sky is marked by a few scudding clouds and the landscape below is concocted from a rich palette of pink, turquoise and purple. Monet left Paris for the Côte d'Azur on 12th January 1888, arriving several days later. On the recommendation of Guy de Maupassant he planned to stay at the Chateau de la Pinède, a hotel popular with artists.

As was often the case, Monet did not find the company of his fellow guests very congenial and in this instance he found the group of artists who gathered around about the Barbizon painter Henri Harpignies particularly irritating. Monet contented himself by first exploring the area around Antibes, Agay and Trayas to the west, then moving towards Monte Carlo in the east, before finally settling on five or six motifs on which to concentrate, including this view of the brightly shining town of Antibes as seen across the bay.

Transfixed by the brilliance of the light, and occasionally overwhelmed by the challenge of representing it on canvas, Monet had a particularly productive campaign in Antibes, returning to Paris in May with close to forty canvases. Discussing the works Monet painted on the Côte d'Azur, Virginia Spate quotes Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage – ‘There is nothing else but grace and measure, richness, quietness, and pleasure’, stating:

‘This is indeed the mood of these paintings, for, in the more constant Mediterranean weather, Monet could afford to concentrate for longer than he could on northern coasts on identifying the pigments with which to create the impression of intensely still coloured light’.

Paul Hayes Tucker has speculated that by travelling throughout France in the 1880s Monet was attempting to decentralise Impressionism which for the most part had been based in Paris. ‘When queried in 1880 about his defection [from the Impressionists], he asserted,

'I am still an Impressionist and will always remain one'.

Unlike some of his former colleagues such as Pissarro, who experimented with the pointillist techniques of the Post-Impressionists, Monet staunchly maintained that belief. Indeed, he put it into practice in an unprecedented way, travelling extensively during the decade to paint some of the most spectacular and varied sites in all of France, from the black, ocean-pounded coast of Belle-Isle on the Atlantic, south of Brittany to the verdant shores of Antibes on the Mediterranean.

The places he chose had dramatically different geological formations, weather conditions, lighting effects, and temperature ranges. They also possessed strikingly different moods, mythologies, associations and appeals. These challenging conditions led Monet to write frequently to his friends and family about his difficulties throughout the decade.

'It is so difficult, so delicate, so tender [in Antibes]', he told Berthe Morisot in 1888, 'particularly for someone like me who is inclined toward tougher subject'.

The remarkable affinity the painter made between his Impressionist ideals and the brilliant light of the South is testament to Monet’s masterful technique. As Joachim Pissarro observed:

‘The status of Monet's painting in Antibes changed as fast as the weather. One day he would work admirably, 'thanks to the eternal and resplendent sun', and the next a terrible wind would make work impossible.

Nevertheless, Monet worked relentlessly. On 1st February, Monet reported that he had 'worked all day without a break: it is definitely so beautiful, but so difficult as well!'

The present work is closely related to the version in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, also entitled Antibes, vue du plateau Notre-Dame. In both canvases the town of Antibes is seen from the slopes of the Garoupe, somewhat further east than the four views of the town seen from the gardens of La Salis.

Discussing the present work, Joachim Pissarro writes: ‘The mountains here are given a prominent position. In Antibes seen from Plateau Notre-Dame [the present work] especially, they dominate every element of the scenery and seem to dictate the chromatic harmonies and contrasts.

The purples, blues and pinks of the stone, heightened and offset by each other, echo throughout the canvas: they are reiterated in the deep azurine blue surface of the sea; in a few mauve clouds; in the surface of the ground; and in the quivering blue leaves of the shaded tree. The Boston painting, by comparison, is chromatically much more suffused and discreet’

Daniel Wildenstein described the settings of these pictures as showing 'the walled town of Antibes with the Bastion of St André, seen from the beach at Ponteil looking northwards. The view is dominated by the belltower of the cathedral and by the tower of the Château Grimaldi. In the foreground is the tip of the Islet, and in the background the Alps which straddle the border between France and Italy’

After several weeks of working in this region, Monet expressed confidence in his work in a letter to Alice Hoschedé written in early February: ‘What I will bring back from here will be pure, gentle sweetness: some white, some pink, and some blue, and all this surrounded by the fairylike air'.

For the artist whose entire career was dedicated to exploring the quality of light and its effect on water, the rich, saturated colours of the Mediterranean provided an ideal environment in which to paint, and resulted in a remarkable series of works unique within Monet’s œuvre.

The achievements Monet had made with these works were immediately appreciated by his admirers when they were first exhibited shortly after Monet's return to Paris.

Not averse to creating rivalry between the dealers who were interested in the development of his career, Monet released ten Antibes paintings to Theo van Gogh who helped Boussod & Valadon to exhibit them in June and July 1888, rather than consigning them to his more regular dealer Charles Durand-Ruel. Writing about the show, Gustave Geffroy noted the startling colouration the works possessed.

‘Changing colours of the sea, green, blue, grey, almost white – vastness of the rainbow-coloured mountains – with colours, clouded, snow-covered – pale silver foliage of the olive trees, black greenery of the pines, blinding red of the earth – silhouette of the dewy golden town, permeated by light’.

The present picture became part of a number of distinguished collections, including that of Thomas Lincoln Manson, a friend of John Singer Sargent, and the Ferry family in America, before being acquired by the late owner in 1996." - Find out more at https://bit.ly/2oLiU30 | Source: Sotheby's, London

11/24/2023

"Landscape: The Parc Monceau”, 1876 Mia Feigelson Gallery


By Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
oil on canvas; 59.7 x 82.6 cm (3 1/2 x 32 1/2 in.)
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bequest of Loula D. Lasker, New York City, 1961
https://bit.ly/2b809gz
https://www.facebook.com/metmuseum

”Situated on the boulevard de Courcelles in Paris and surrounded by fashionable town houses, the Parc Monceau was planned in the late eighteenth century in the form of an English garden.

Monet painted three views of the park in the spring of 1876. This one, shown at the 1877 Impressionist exhibition, focuses on the swaths of green grass and blooming trees. The building visible at left in this painting also appears in two works from 1878, including one in the Museum’s collection." — Find out more https://bit.ly/2b809gz

11/21/2023

"Regatta at Sainte-Adresse", 1867 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

oil on canvas; 75.2 x 101.6 cm (29 5/8 x 40 in.)
Place of creation: Sainte-Adresse, a suburb of Le Havre, France
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bequest of William Church Osborn, 1951 https://bit.ly/2HwSVBV
https://www.facebook.com/metmuseum

Overview:
"This painting and 'The Beach at Sainte-Adresse' (at The Art Institute of Chicago; see the painting http://bit.ly/2ods0TO) were probably conceived as a pair. They are identical in size, and the point of view differs by only a few yards.

Sainte-Adresse, the well-to-do suburb of Le Havre, was the home of Monet's father. Destitute, Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his father and his aunt Sophie Lecadre at the cost of abandoning his companion, Camille Doncieux, and their newborn son, Jean. Monet attended his birth in Paris on August 8 and returned to Sainte-Adresse on August 12.

The pair of paintings juxtaposes this sunny regatta, watched at high tide by well-dressed bourgeois, with an overcast scene at low tide, showing fishing boats hauled onto the beach peopled with sailors and workers.

Since Monet never exhibited the paintings side by side, the contrast between them was not intended as a social manifesto but instead reflected differing conditions under which the same scene, convenient to his father's house, could be observed." ― Find out more https://bit.ly/2HwSVBV

11/19/2023

"Cabin of the Customs Watch, Morning Effect", 1882 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
oil on canvas; 54 x 65 cm (21.3 x 25.6 in.)
Place of creation: Varengeville-sur-Mer, west of Dieppe, France (Dieppe is a commune in the Seine-Maritime department in France. A port on the English Channel)
Private Collection

Curator's comment:
"Located along the Normandy coast just west of Dieppe at Varengeville, the present work was painted by Monet in 1882. During this excursion, he painted several versions of this dramatic setting and was lured back again almost fifteen years later to continue the series in 1896 and 1897.

The small cabin that appears in many of these paintings was built as a customs house during the Napoleonic blockade of Europe; from this clifftop perch, officials could spot incoming cargo ships that needed to be intercepted and taxed. Later, the weathered cabin was used by local fishermen for storage and shelter.

Having managed to obtain the keys to the customs house to use it as a local resident, Monet was so pleased upon his return in 1896 that he told Alice Hoschedé, 'it was just as I had left it'.

Indeed, Monet could identify with the local residents, as he was raised in nearby Le Havre and Sainte-Addresse. His love for the region is evident in his frequent representations of these towns as well as neighbouring villages such as Trouville, Étretat, Deauville, and Dieppe.

Unlike Monet's earlier paintings of bustling city boulevards, or the crowded beaches and boardwalks of fashionable seaside resorts, the present canvas evokes a more innocent memory of the French countryside, where one could experience an authentic appreciation of nature.

According to Paul Tucker, Monet personally identified with such scenes:

'In almost all of these views, Monet depicts the house as isolated and alone, vulnerable and steadfast, as if it were a human being... Whether blown by the winds or bathed in brilliant sunlight, the house also takes on the attributes of a landscape painter alone with his motifs, enduring the elements in order to be one with them much like Monet himself'." — Find out more https://bit.ly/2YVMfpM | Source: Christie's, New York

11/14/2023

⭐ Happy birthday Master Claude Monet ⭐
Photos of Claude Monet Mia Feigelson Gallery
'What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.'

'Colour is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.'

'The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.'
'I would like to paint the way a bird sings.'

'Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.'

'It seems to me, when I see nature, that I see it ready made, completely written — but then, try to do it! All this proves that one must think of nothing but impressions; it is by dint of observation and reflection that one makes discoveries.'

'For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.'

'My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects, and I still very much regret having caused the naming of a group whose majority had nothing impressionist about it.' ― Claude Monet

https://www.facebook.com/MiaFeigelson
Photos of Claude Monet
'What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.'

'Colour is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.'

'The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.'
'I would like to paint the way a bird sings.'

'Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.'

'It seems to me, when I see nature, that I see it ready made, completely written — but then, try to do it! All this proves that one must think of nothing but impressions; it is by dint of observation and reflection that one makes discoveries.'

'For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.'

'My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects, and I still very much regret having caused the naming of a group whose majority had nothing impressionist about it.' ― Claude Monet

11/12/2023

Water Llies, 1908 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

oil on canvas; 100 x 81.3 cm (39 3/8 x 32 in.)
Private Collection

Overview:
"Claude Monet’s Nymphéas are among the most iconic and celebrated Impressionist paintings. The profound impact these pictures have made on the evolution of Modern Art marks this series as Monet’s greatest achievement. The famous lily pond in his garden at Giverny provided the subject matter for most of his major late works.

These spectacular canvases document the changes in his style and his constant pictorial innovations as he continued to paint this theme until his death in 1926. The present work dates from circa 1908 when he painted what are arguably the finest and most technically sophisticated examples from the series.

The canvas here is an extraordinary example of the artist's virtuosity as a colourist. The surface texture is rich with detail, particularly in the passages where the blossoms float atop the water. This distinction between reflection and surface, water and flora, and the general clarity of the scene are particularly striking in Monet's canvas here, and evidence its distinction as one of the most technically sophisticated of the entire series.

By 1890, Monet had become financially successful enough to buy the house with a large garden at Giverny, which he had rented since 1883. With enormous vigor and determination, he swiftly set about transforming the gardens and creating a large pond.

There were initially a number of complaints about Monet’s plans to divert the river Epte through his garden in order to feed his new pond, which he had to address in his application to the Préfet of the Eure department:

'I would like to point out to you that, under the pretext of public salubrity, the aforementioned opponents have in fact no other goal than to hamper my projects out of pure meanness, as is frequently the case in the country where Parisian landowners are involved

[…] I would also like you to know that the aforementioned cultivation of aquatic plants will not have the importance that this term implies and that it will be only a pastime, for the pleasure of the eye, and for motifs to paint.'

Once the garden was designed according to the artist’s vision, it offered a boundless source of inspiration, and provided the major themes that dominated the last three decades of Monet’s career. Towards the end of his life, he obfuscated his initial intentions, perhaps with a mind to his own mythology, telling a visitor to his studio:

'It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I planted them purely for pleasure; I grew them with no thought of painting them. A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then, all at once I had the revelation – how wonderful my pond was – and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment.'

The spectacular field of colour presented by this work is created to elicit an instinctive emotional response rather than to record a particular location, temporal conditions or natural phenomena. Over the course of several years, Monet experimented with different approaches and painting techniques.

The paintings from 1905 were thickly painted with a dense surface and horizontally oriented, while those from 1906 interplay between rich impastoed areas with finer washes. In 1907 Monet positioned his canvases vertically and experimented with longer brushstrokes.

Another important feature of the works from this period is how Monet removed the perspectival elements that had existed in his earlier renditions of the lily pond, so the banks and borders which were sometimes featured no longer informed the scope or scale of the works.

Since the birth of Impressionism, Monet’s primary concern had been the sensation of color and its properties and these technical innovations underwrote his highly advanced theoretical approach.

In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator goes to visit a fictional painter called Elstir who was based in part on Monet. Here, in the studio the narrator begins to see Elstir’s new purpose for art:

'But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew.

The names which denote things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with itself.'

The present work fulfills the promise of Elstir’s intentions, managing to transcend painting's traditional, illusory function in order to create a new sense of purpose for art. "
— Find out more https://bit.ly/2gyFiH3

11/05/2023

"The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil", 1881 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)


oil on canvas; 100 x 80 cm (39.4 x 31.6 in.)
Private Collection
Sitters:
Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, Alice Hoschedé's youngest child (1877-1961) | Alice Hoschedé would later become Monet's wife
Michel Monet, Claude Monet's younger son (1878-1966)

Context:
"In September 1878, Claude Monet took up residence at Vétheuil, a village northwest of Paris. Although this period was marked by personal loss and financial hardship, it was also one of intense productivity. Over the course of the three years he spent there, Monet executed nearly three hundred paintings, and his art shifted away from scenes of modern life toward a more focused exploration of landscape and atmospheric effects.

In the summer of 1881, Monet began work on a group of four closely related canvases showing a private garden bursting with sunflowers. Of the four paintings, the work now in the Norton Simon collection (see the painting https://bit.ly/2RXoAD3 ) is closest in palette and composition to the one in Washington (see the painting https://bit.ly/3i2atan), and they share distinct elements absent from the other two works, such as the clouds and the placement of shadows in the foreground.

The Norton Simon canvas has long been thought to have been the model for the larger, more detailed Washington picture, but recent examinations have called this theory into question. At some later date, Monet repainted the foreground of the Washington painting, at which point he mistakenly added the erroneous date of 1880, further confusing the works’ chronology.

The other two paintings are in Private Collection (including the present canvas)" — Find out more https://bit.ly/3i29ln0 | Source: the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

11/01/2023

"The Artist's House at Giverny (La Maison de l'artiste à Giverny)", 1913 Mia Feigelson Gallery
By Claude Monet (French, 1840-1026)

oil on canvas; 73 x 92 cm (28¾ x 36¼ in.)
Private Collection

Overview:
"Although the garden was a favored subject for many of the Impressionists, including Manet, Renoir, and Caillebotte, no artist rivaled Monet in his dedication to the theme. The scholar Robert Herbert has written,
'Of all the Impressionists it was Monet who was chiefly responsible for elevating the garden to the ranks of the most admired and influential paintings of the early modern era'.

The artist especially liked to paint his own gardens, first at Argenteuil, then at Vétheuil, and finally at Giverny, where the garden became his pre-eminent subject. During the last two decades of his life, Monet painted around three hundred views of the grounds at Giverny, which have been widely hailed as landmarks of late Impressionism. Paul Tucker has commented,

'These paintings stand as eloquent witness to an aging artist's irrepressible urge to express his feelings in front of nature and also attest to his persistent desire to reinvent the look of landscape art and to leave a legacy of significance'.

The artist and his family moved to Giverny in April 1883. Situated at the confluence of the Seine and the Epte about forty miles northwest of Paris, Giverny was a picturesque farming community of just two hundred and seventy-nine residents. Upon his arrival there, Monet rented a large, pink stucco house on two acres of land.

When the property came up for sale in 1890, Monet purchased it at the asking price of 22,000 francs, 'certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,' as he wrote to Durand-Ruel.

An enthusiastic gardener all his life, Monet immediately began tearing up the existing kitchen garden and planting lush flower beds on the gentle slope in front of the house (fig. 2). Three years later, he acquired an adjacent plot of land and applied to the local government for permission 'to install a prise d'eau in order to provide enough water to refresh the pond that I am going to dig for the purpose of cultivating aquatic plants'.

By the autumn of 1893, Monet had converted nearly one thousand square meters into a lavish lily pond, spanned by a wooden footbridge and ringed by an artful arrangement of flowers, trees, and bushes.

The flower garden at Giverny was a classic French country garden. Dozens of beds were laid out at right angles to either side of a wide, graveled walk, filled with a spectrum of flowers that bloomed from early spring to late fall in carefully orchestrated displays of colour.

There were bowers of roses, arches of clematis, bold masses of poppies and peonies, supple stems of lily and foxglove, and spreading mats of nasturtium and pink saxifrage. Describing a visit to Giverny, the critic Arsène Alexandre wrote,

'Suddenly a new and extraordinary pageant greets us with the unexpectedness of all great surprises. Imagine every colour of a palette, all the tones of a fanfare. This is Monet's garden. Though the effect from the outside is dazzling enough, the sensation on entering is even more intense.

There is no rest for the flowers of the garden at Giverny. Everywhere you turn, at your feet, over your head, at chest height, are pools, festoons, hedges of flowers, their harmonies at once spontaneous and designed and renewed at every season'.

The gardens at Giverny were created not only to fulfill Monet's passion for nature, but also to provide the painter with artistic motifs. In his petition to the government for permission to build the lily pond, Monet specified that it would serve 'for the pleasure of the eyes and also for the purpose of having subjects to paint.'

Critics too repeatedly commented on the painterly quality of Monet's gardens. Marcel Proust, for instance, wrote,

'f I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak'.

Arsène Alexandre made a similar point: "Here is a painter who, in our own time, has multiplied th
e harmonies of colour, has gone as far as one person can into the subtlety, opulence, and resonance of colour. Who inspired all this? His flowers. Who was his teacher? His garden.'

The present painting is one of two canvases that Monet made in 1913 depicting the northwestern corner of the flower garden and the upper story of the artist's house. The two works are closely related to a series of pictures from 1900-1902, which show the bordered pathways leading south from the house toward Monet's lily pond.

In the 1912-1913 paintings, however, the handling is looser and more expressive, with dense webs of paint evoking a jungle of flowers and foliage. Tucker has noted,

'Despite certain resemblances to earlier works, this new group is quite distinctive. The various forms of foliage surge and swirl as if competing for prominence in the scene while the house peers into the fray from behind the tangled brushwork like an inquisitive though somewhat fearful spectator'.

The present picture is also noteworthy as one of a very few canvases that Monet made between 1909 and 1913, a troubled time in his personal life. His wife, Alice Hoschedé, was diagnosed with leukemia in early 1910 and died a year later. His eldest son Jean began to suffer health problems shortly thereafter and succumbed to syphilis in 1914.

During the same period, Monet learned that he had a cataract in his right eye, and flooding of the Seine and the Epte caused substantial damage to his beloved gardens. In August 1911, the artist lamented to his step-daughter Blanche Hoschedé,

'I am completely fed up with painting and I am going to pack up my brushes and colours for good'.

By the following year, however, his mood had brightened, and he wrote to Durand-Ruel, "The doctor did not forbid my continuing to paint, and if the weather finally wants to improve, I will once again bravely take up working, which more than ever is what I need'.

Executed around this time, La Maison de l'artiste à Giverny is evidence of Monet's persistent and insuppressible creative vitality. As Daniel Wildenstein has written, 'This view of his home, painted from the garden, shows'." ― Find out more https://bit.ly/3s4dz6a | Source: Christie's, New York