Enter Monet’s garden of delight at the RA
Giant water lilies are highlight of new exhibition
THE most famous water lilies in art are to take centre stage in a new exhibition charting the role of gardens in the paintings of Claude Monet and his contemporaries.
The blockbuster Royal Ac ademy show will span the length of Monet’s career from the early 1860s to the Twenties. It will conclude with a “spectacular grand finale”, a display of his three giant water lily paintings, the Agapanthus Triptych of 1916-1919. Each are four metres wide and two metres high. They will be shown together in Britain for the first time.
The exhibition will reveal how paintings of gardens by artists as diverse as Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as Monet, reflected the social changes of the time. Announcing the show today, curator Ann Dumas said: “Monet and his garden at Giverny are at the core of the exhibition because he is the artist gardener par excellence.
“There are about 120 works of which 35 are by Monet. Monet himself thought he was a greater gardener than painter.” The display will include documentary materials including his horticultural books and journals, as well as receipts for purchases of plants and excerpts from letters. Other artists’ gardens featured include those of Joaquín Sorolla in Madrid, and Max Liebermann and Emil Nolde, both in Germany. Like Giverny, they still exist.
Ms Dumas said the exhibition was a social history. “The kind of garden as we know it today — when everyone can have a piece of suburban paradise and is a middle - class pursuit — really emerges at this time. Before that, there had been aristocratic or royal parks and peasants growing food.”
At the end of the 19th century, Symbolists, Fauves and German Expressionists imagined gardens as visionary utopias. The show extends to avantgarde 20th century artists such as Nolde and Wassily Kandinsky, because “people forget that Monet lives into the first quarter of the 20th century,” Ms Dumas added.
The paintings of the Agapanthus Triptych are now owned by three American museums. They are closely related to the great panorama Monet donated to the French state and which is now in the Orangerie in Paris.