Water Lilies: Green Reflections, Musée de l'Orangerie
Water Lilies
Claude Monet · c. 1915 to 1926
Preview image: Water Lilies, 1916 to 1919 (Met)
01
12 November 1918.
The Armistice was yesterday.
Monet writes to Clemenceau.
02
He offers France two panels.
Signed on Victory Day.
A monument to peace.
03
Clemenceau talks him up.
Two panels become the whole series.
The 1922 contract: nineteen panels.
04
Clemenceau picks the building.
The Orangerie, in the Tuileries.
Two rooms. Walls of water.
05
The gift is signed.
The paintings stay at Giverny.
He kept them until he died, in 1926.
The whole panel.
Eight and a half metres of it.
Preview image: Water Lilies, 1916 to 1919 (Met)
“…the illusion of an endless whole, of a horizonless and shoreless wave.”
25 August 1944
The panels were judged too fragile to take down.
So they stayed on the walls.
Then came the Liberation of Paris.
Shells hit the Orangerie.
Some of the panels were struck.
Claude Monet
French · Impressionism · 1840 to 1926
Sources · 5
- Musée de l'Orangerie: History of the Water Lilies cycle
- Musée de l'Orangerie: Archives of the genesis and history of the Water Lilies
- Musée de l'Orangerie: Condition and restoration documentation
- Smarthistory: Claude Monet, Les Nymphéas
- Haus der Kunst: Cyprien Gaillard, Wassermusik (Orangerie archive material)