The guns had been silent for a single day. On 12 November 1918, Claude Monet, seventy-seven years old and losing his sight to cataracts, wrote to his old friend Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister. He wanted to give France two of his large paintings of water lilies, as a monument to peace.
Those two panels grew into something far bigger.
A pond instead of a battlefield
For years, Monet had been painting almost nothing but the pond in his garden at Giverny: the lilies, the willows, the reflections of clouds. He worked on vast canvases, some of them several metres long, in a studio built specially for them.
The gift became a whole cycle, eventually installed in two oval rooms at the Orangerie, in the Tuileries garden. Monet kept retouching the panels until the end. He died in December 1926; the rooms opened to the public a few months later, in 1927.
Other water lily paintings left the studio and travelled the world, like this long panel now in New York.
Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914–1926. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
No horizon, no edge
Look for the horizon. You won't find one. There's no bank, no sky, only water, with the sky reflected in it. Monet takes away everything that tells you where you're standing, so your eye has nowhere to go but deeper.
A floating meditation
- Look at the painting, or any water lilies you can find, as a whole for a minute.
- Choose one lily pad. Let your eyes rest on it the way the pad rests on the water.
- Now look for the sky inside the water: the pale clouds, the blue between the leaves.
- Breathe slowly and imagine the surface moving very gently with each breath.
- Close your eyes. Feel your body as heavy and light at the same time, like something floating.
For more of Monet, here's Giverny without the rush and why Monet painted the same haystacks again and again.
One painting at a time
"(letters) On Art" brings a letter and a postcard every month, and each season the printed issue of "(meditating) On Art". One painting at a time, at your own pace, wherever you are.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi