I visited the Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris during my stay in the ‘City of
Lights’, in December 2010. The Museum is an art gallery of impressionist and
post-impressionist paintings, located on the banks of the Seine in the old
orangery of the Tuileries Palace, on the Place de la Concorde near the Concorde
metro station.
I first encountered two of Monet’s magnificent Water Lily
masterpieces when visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Although I had seen photographs of some of these paintings
often enough, nothing prepared me for the sheer joy I experienced standing
before these masterpieces of shadow, light and colour.
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor
of 45, rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the
most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of
expressing one's perceptions before nature. The term Impressionism, is derived
from the title of his painting: Impression, Sunrise (Impression,
soleil levant).
Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s through the end of his life
in 1926, Monet worked on several "series" paintings, in which his
subject matter was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. Using his
own gardens (with their water lilies, pond, and bridge as inspiration), Monet’s
Water Lilies date from this period.
In 1922, Claude Monet signed
a contract donating the Nymphéas series of decorative panels to the French
government. With input from Monet, the Nymphéas were arranged on the ground
floor of the Orangerie in 1927. The eight paintings are displayed in two oval
rooms, and are viewed under direct diffused light as was originally intended by
Monet.
In what I can only assume
is a very unconventional method of mounting the paintings, the eight massive
canvases have been glued directly to the walls.
Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of
86, and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. His home, garden and water
lily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, to the French Academy of Fine Arts
in 1966. Through the Claude Monet Foundation, the house and gardens have been open
for visits since 1980, and are a ‘must see’ for all devotees of Monet’s work.
According to the museum's website, the Orangerie was
originally built in 1852 to shelter the orange trees of the garden of the
Tuileries. Today, while it is most famous for being the permanent home for
eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet, the Musée de l’Orangerie also
contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo
Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri Rousseau among others.
Here is a brief look at some of those magnificent works of
art:
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