monet

MONET mania came home this week as an exhibition which brings together the largest collection of the Impressionist master’s paintings of water lilies opened on Thursday at the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Unlike the recent blockbuster show in London, which concentrated on the 20th-century works, the new Paris exhibition focuses exclusively on Monet’s paintings of the white water lilies in his garden at Giverny, a subject which obsessed him during the last 30 years of his life as he battled encroaching blindness to capture their shimmering beauty before it was too late.
It is a unique event which could only happen at the Orangerie as the exhibition’s centre-piece, the majestic eight-panel mural of water lilies which Monet gave to the state in 1922, is actually built into the curved walls of the museum itself and cannot be moved. The mural, which is the crowning achievement of the water lily paintings, is crucial to understanding their development and the sh...