Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (8 page)

One irony of Monet’s approach was that these paintings of fleeting visual effects at single moments in time actually took many months of work. “I paint entirely out of doors,” he once airily informed a journalist. “I never touch my work in my studio.”
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However, virtually all of Monet’s canvases, although begun on the beaches or in the fields, were actually completed back in the studio, often far from the motif and with much teeth-gnashing labor.
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Octave Mirbeau reported that
a single Monet canvas might take “sixty sessions” of work.
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Some of the canvases, moreover, were given fifteen layers of paint.
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His London paintings were finished not beside the banks of the Thames but as much as two years later in his studio in Giverny, beside the Seine, with the assistance of photographs. The revelation that Monet used photographs caused something of a scandal when this expedient was revealed in 1905 thanks to the indiscreet and possibly malicious comments of several of Monet’s London acquaintances, including Sargent. Monet had risked a similar kind of scandal when he took one of his Rouen Cathedral paintings to Norway.

There was another irony to Monet’s paintings. Many of them evoked gorgeous visions of rural tranquility: sun-dappled summer afternoons along a riverbank or fashionable women promenading in flowery meadows. As Mirbeau wrote, nature appeared in Monet’s paintings in “warm breaths of love” and “spasms of joy.”
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His pleasingly bucolic scenes were combined with a flickering brushwork that produced delicious vibrations of color. The overall result was that many observers regarded his paintings as possessing a soothing effect on both the eye and the brain—and Monet himself as
le peintre du bonheur
(the painter of happiness). Geffroy believed Monet’s works could offer comforting distraction and alleviate fatigue, while Monet himself speculated that they might calm “nerves strained through overwork” and offer the stressed-out viewer “an asylum of peaceful meditation.”
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The writer Marcel Proust, an ardent admirer, even believed Monet’s paintings could play a spiritually curative role “analogous to that of psychotherapists with certain neurasthenics”—by which he meant those whose weakened nerves had left them at the mercy of fast-paced modern life.
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Proust was not alone. More than a century later, an Impressionist expert at Sotheby’s in London called Monet “the great anti-depressant.”
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This “great anti-depressant” was, however, a neurasthenic who enjoyed anything but peaceful meditation as he worked on his paintings. Geffroy described Monet as “a perpetual worrier, forever anguished,” while to Clemenceau he was
le monstre
and
le roi des grincheux
—“king of the grumps.”
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Monet could be volatile and bad-tempered at the best of
times, but when work at his easel did not proceed to his satisfaction—lamentably often—he flew into long and terrible rages. Clemenceau neatly summed up the quintessential Monet scenario of the artist throwing a tantrum in the midst of blissful scenery: “I imagine you in a Niagara of rainbows,” he wrote to Monet, “picking a fight with the sun.”
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Monet’s letters are filled with references to his gloom and anger. Part of his problem was the weather. Monet could pick a fight with the sun, the wind, or the rain. Painting in the open air left him at the mercy of the elements, at which he raged like King Lear. His constant gripes about the wind and rain had once earned him a scolding from Mirbeau: “As for the nauseatingly horrible weather we have and that we will have until the end of August, you have the right to curse. But to believe that you’re finished as a painter because it’s raining and windy—this is pure madness.”
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It was a strange contradiction of Monet’s practice that he wished to work in warm, calm, sunny conditions, and yet for much of his career he chose to paint in Normandy: a part of France that was, as a nineteenth-century guidebook glumly affirmed, “generally cold and wet...subject to rapid and frequent changes, and fairly long spells of bad weather that result in unseasonable temperatures.”
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Working on the windswept coast of Normandy in the spring of 1896, he found conditions exasperating. “Yesterday I thought I would go mad,” he wrote. “The wind blew away my canvases and, when I set down my palette to recover them, the wind blew it away too. I was so furious I almost threw everything away.”
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Sometimes Monet did in fact throw everything away. On one occasion he hurled his color box into the river Epte in a blind rage, then was obliged to telegraph Paris, once he calmed down, to have a new one delivered.
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On another occasion, he flung himself into the Seine. “Luckily no harm was done,” he reassured a friend.
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Monet’s canvases likewise felt his wrath. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé witnessed him committing “acts of violence” against them, slashing them with a penknife, stamping them into the ground or thrusting his foot through them.
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An American visitor saw a painting of one of his stepdaughters with “a tremendous crisscross rent right through the
centre”—the result of an enraged Monet giving it a vicious kick. Since he had been wearing wooden clogs at the time, the damage was considerable.
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Sometimes he even set fire to his canvases before he could be stopped. On occasion his rages became so intense that he would roam the fields and then, to spare his family, check into a hotel nearby in Vernon. At other times he retreated to his bedroom for days at a time, refusing both meals and attempts at consolation. Friends tried to coax him from his gloom with diverting trips to Paris. “Come to Paris for two days,” Mirbeau pleaded with him during one of these spells. “We shall walk. We shall go here and there...to the Jardin des Plantes, which is an admirable thing, and to the Théâtre-Français. We shall eat well, we shall say stupid things, and we shall not see any paintings.”
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There was another contradiction in Monet’s practice. He loved to paint and, indeed, he lived to paint—and yet he claimed to find painting an unremitting torment. “This satanic painting tortures me,” he once wrote to a friend, the painter Berthe Morisot.
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To a journalist he said: “Many people think I paint easily, but it is not an easy thing to be an artist. I often suffer tortures when I paint. It is a great joy and a great suffering.”
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Monet’s rage and suffering before his easel reveal the disingenuousness of his famous comment about Vincent van Gogh. Mirbeau, who owned Van Gogh’s
Irises
, once proudly showed the work to Monet. “How did a man who loved flowers and light so much,” Monet responded, “and who painted them so well, make himself so unhappy?”
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Some of Monet’s friends regarded his torture and suffering as a necessary condition of his genius—as a symptom of his search for perfection, or what Geffroy called the “dream of form and color” that he pursued “almost to the point of self-annihilation.”
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After witnessing yet another fit of dyspepsia, Clemenceau wrote to Monet that “if you were not pushed by an eternal search for the unattainable, you would not be the author of so many masterpieces.”
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As Clemenceau once explained to his secretary apropos of Monet’s dreadful fits of temper: “One must suffer. One must not be satisfied...With a painter who slashes his canvases, who weeps, who explodes with rage in front of his painting, there is hope.”
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Clemenceau must have realized that in persuading Monet to paint large-scale canvases of his water lily pond he had not only rekindled the painter’s hopes but also, as a sore temptation to fate, his exasperation and rage.

OVER THE DECADES,
Monet experienced various difficulties and privations. Early on, he endured bouts of poverty and critical derision. Later, he suffered from rheumatic pains—“the price of my time in the rain and snow”
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—and cataracts, which may have been partly the price of his time in the bright sunshine staring at reflective, sparkling waters. However, no paintings had ever given him so many difficulties—and been the cause of so much anguished self-doubt and so many shredded canvases—as those of his water lilies. The 1909 exhibition
Les Nymphéas: Séries de paysages d’eau par Claude Monet
may have been his greatest critical and commercial triumph, but creating these magical waterscapes had plunged him into terrible anxiety and depression.

Monet had begun painting his newly expanded water garden in 1903. A year later a visiting journalist found him at the side of the pond working on twelve separate canvases, which he rotated according to the light.
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An exhibition was scheduled for the spring of 1907, but things did not go well, and one month before the opening he asked for a postponement of a year, informing the gallery’s proprietor, Paul Durand-Ruel, that he had just destroyed thirty canvases.
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Matters were made even worse when, that spring, a violent storm damaged his garden. A year later, with the paintings still not ready, Monet dramatically renounced the projected exhibition “once and for all.”
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Forsaking his lily pond, he began painting baskets of eggs.

Monet’s wife, Alice, began to despair of him as the black moods endured. “He punctures canvases every day,” she lamented.
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An American newspaper reported with incredulity that in a single day in May 1908 Monet destroyed $100,000 worth of paintings, raising the questions about whether (as the paper put it) he was an artist or a fool.
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He began refusing to eat his lunch—a bad sign in such a gourmand—and stayed in his bedroom all day long. He began suffering headaches, fits of
dizziness and blurred vision. His friends, as always, rallied and cajoled. Mirbeau gently chastised him for canceling the exhibition, noting that such behavior was “insane and painful” in someone who was “without doubt the greatest and most magnificent painter of our time.”
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Buoyed by such praise, Monet finally returned to his canvases. “These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession,” he wrote to Geffroy in the summer of 1908.
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In 1909, two years later than planned, Monet exhibited a total of forty-eight paintings of his lily pond. By this time Monet’s anguished struggles were well publicized. A critic for
Le Gaulois
noted that the paintings were being shown to the public only after “much hesitation, anxiety and modesty” on the part of the artist, while another critic, Arsène Alexandre, informed his readers that Monet had become the victim of fatigue and neurasthenia.
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Neurasthenia was a malady more usually associated with women, Jews, male weaklings, homosexuals, and the morally debauched.
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It must have come as a shock to many that Monet, the hale and hearty “peasant of Vernon,” with his wooden clogs and robust physique, was suffering from this nervous affliction.

Monet’s nervous fatigue was not merely the result of the winds that billowed his canvases or the rains that pelted and pummeled his precious garden. Nor was it simply caused by sitting in the same spot and staring at the same scene, day after day—the kind of sedentary activity that, the experts were agreed, could result in neurasthenia and that, in Rouen in 1892, had left him with disagreeable nightmares of the cathedral falling on his head. Monet’s anguish was caused more than anything by his attempt to do something entirely new and different, indeed revolutionary. His own description of the project was typically laconic: “The crucial thing is the mirror of water whose appearance changes constantly with the reflections from the sky.”
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The water did indeed change in appearance in his paintings, turning from pale green or dusky mauve to salmon pink and fiery orange. But how he composed his motif of water and sky revealed a gradual change in his artistic vision—the bold experiment that, as Geffroy claimed, had driven him to the brink of self-annihilation.

Monet was unique in attempting to paint a still, reflective surface of water in a steep, close-up perspective. Painters of water usually concentrated on more distant effects, such as moonlight shimmering on ruffled rivers or waves crashing heavily on the beach. Monet himself was an acknowledged master of these sorts of waterscapes: Édouard Manet once called him the “Raphael of water.”
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But Monet beside his lily pond was in search of more intimate impressions as he registered not only the surface vegetation and reflections but also the water’s half-hidden depths. He had already tried his hand at capturing these subtle underwater effects. “I am troubled by impossible things,” he complained to Geffroy as he painted beside the river Epte in 1890, “such as water with vegetation undulating in its depths.”
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The upshot of these subaqueous preoccupations had been a canvas showing his stepdaughters Blanche and Suzanne in a rowboat, drifting through (as Mirbeau poetically described the scene) “the liquid transparencies of an extraordinary world of underwater flora, of long filaments of algae, muddy and untamed, which, under the pressure of the current, tremble and twist.”
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