Monet was such a renowned painter of seascapes that upon seeing the ocean along the Brittany coast for the first time, exclaimed:" Oh, how beautiful–it's a Monet."–Auguste Rodin
Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet's brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.”
Monet was such a renowned painter of seascapes that upon seeing the ocean along the Brittany coast for the first time, exclaimed:" Oh, how beautiful–it's a Monet."–Auguste Rodin
"Paradoxically for a painter who wished to give the impression of spontaneity Monet's painting technique actually required a good deal of forethought and groundwork. A visitor to his studio once counted seventy-five paintbrushes and forty boxes of pigments."
King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture--from his lavish lifestyle and tempestuous personality to his close friendship with Rodin and the fiery war leader Georges Clemenceau, who regarded the Water Lilies as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit. Speaking when Big Ben tolled the bells of peace on November 11, 1918 Winston Churchill wrote:"Clemenceau embodied and expressed France. As much as any single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be a nation, he was France."
In 1903 the Art Institute of Chicago became the first museum in America to own a Monet when they paid $2,900 for Bad Weather, Pourville.
Monet's obsession with water lilies had begun when he glimpsed Latour-Marliac's hybrids at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. By that time the water lily with its allusions to grief and loss possessed special associations and symbolic values. The plant and its flowers went beyond horticulture and botany inhabiting the realms of art, myth, literature and religion.
On the misty morning of December 8, 1925 Monet was buried. "Normandy was dressed as her painter would have wished. The still waters of the river vibrated the thousands of glitters of gold, pink, and purple from which he had made his palette. The waters reflected a mysterious sky of pink, purple and gold, dissolving poplars, and misty outlines of low hills. Normany was a Monet."–Le Figaro
