Claude Monet's Water Lilies

Claude Monet's Water Lilies

Water Lilies is a series of about 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist master Claude Monet. They are the most representative works of his later years, with stunning techniques, depicting water lily pond, creating a visual effect of sparkling water extending distantly on a vertical plane. The foliage is pure green, while the flowers are red just like flame. Seemingly random but soft brush strokes, seems to make water flow up, then catch the magic and dreamy light and shadow of the water. Visitors stand near the painting, as if they were standing in the pond in person and experiencing the beauty of the art.
Impressionism is one of the most important art forms of the 19th century in France. It symbolizes the farewell to the tradition art and entering into the modern art. The term Impressionism was derived from Claude Monet's (1840 --- 1926) work "Impression, Sunrise", which is a painting depicting the wonderful misty seascape at sunrise. With a short and chaotic brush strokes, the painting show the beauty of a misty morning.
Monet planted a water garden at the village of Giverny outside Paris where he and his family lived since May 1883, and the introduction of water to form a water garden. Monet planted a variety of willows and flowers around the pond, and planted a lot of water lilies in the pond. In the afternoon sun, on the mirror-like surface of the water, the water lilies were floating freely, clustering together into single rafts of leaves and blossoms and then spreading off in different directions at the whim of the moving water. The colors and lights and oriental poetic sentiment magically blended together here. In his later years, Monet almost put all of his energy goes into the creation of the water lily paintings.
Monet exhibited 12 water lily paintings at first. After 1904, Monet painted another 48 water lily paintings, and there has been no bridges. Sometimes the sky was invisible and the water was very deep and dark. Monet ended his work on the series in September 1908 and agreed to exhibit the whole series the following spring in his Paris gallery. Every one of the 48 works bore the same name, Water Lilies; the differences were articulated through tone, color, and format rather than content. The exhibition was a great success. In his later years, Monet's vision had been getting worse. The cataracts almost made him blind, but he did insist on his paintings. The colours also participate in this transformation of space, because Monet's palette has changed: "no more colour contrast, no more reflection of the brushstrokes. Large, almost, monochrome areas of fluid colours close to one another on the chromatic scale, green or blue, sometimes tinted with violet in which the water of the pond and the reflections of the sky become mixed up, and large fairly dark areas on which the white or yellow, and sometimes red of the flowers or of several water lilies stand out, barely sketched, rather surrounded or encircled but spreading their swirls of light.".
Some people think that the subject of Monet's water lily paintings in his later years is too single, too much emphasis on skills, not so more revolutionary as his works of the 19th century. So after his death, for a long period of time, his studio and water garden was forgotten by people. However, after 1950, with the rise of abstract expressionist art, people come to realize that the artist's water lily series in fact are more Naturalism than Impressionist, and has come into a field of freedom and subjective performance. When the artist depict the scenery of the pond, his subjective will was above nature. This is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the art history. Now the French government has built a circular museum by the pond in Giverny, where displays the "Water Lily" series.