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Starry night, by Van Gogh (downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night )

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The Starry Night ( Dutch: De sterrennacht) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art.

The Monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole

In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived, allowing him to occupy not only a second-story bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as a painting studio.

During the year Van Gogh stayed at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the prolific output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued. During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the Irises from May 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait from September 1889, in the Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted mid-June by around 18 June, the date he wrote to his brother Theo to say he had a new study of a starry sky.

Van Gogh's bedroom in the asylum

Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The view has been identified as the one from his bedroom window, facing east, a view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty-one times,[citation needed ] including The Starry Night. "Through the iron-barred window", he wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed square of wheat ... above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory."

Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of the day and under various weather conditions, such as the sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. While the hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able there to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper; eventually, he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh exaggerated their size in six of these paintings, most notably in F717 Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees closer to the picture plane.

One of the first paintings of the view was F611 Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, now in Copenhagen. Van Gogh made a number of sketches for the painting, of which F1547 The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm is typical. It is unclear whether the painting was made in his studio or outside. In his 9 June letter describing it, he mentions he had been working outside for a few days. Van Gogh described the second of the two landscapes he mentions he was working on, in a letter to his sister Wil on 16 June 1889. This is F719 Green Wheat Field with Cypress, now in Prague, and the first painting at the asylum he definitely painted en plein air. F1548 Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, now in New York, is a study for it. Two days later, Vincent wrote to Theo stating that he had painted "a starry sky".

The Starry Night is the only nocturne in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". Researchers have determined that Venus (sometimes referred to as the "morning star") was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in the spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly as bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is actually Venus.

The Moon is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that it actually was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the picture, and even if the phase of the Moon had been its waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh's Moon would not have been astronomically correct. (For other interpretations of the Moon, see below.) The one pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh's cell is the village, which is based on a sketch (F1541v) made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Pickvance thought F1541v was done later, and the steeple more Dutch than Provençal, a conflation of several Van Gogh had painted and drawn in his Nuenen period, and thus the first of his " reminisces of the North" he was to paint and draw early the following year. Hulsker thought a landscape on the reverse (F1541r) was also a study for the painting.

Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night. After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on or about 20 September 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as a "night study." Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided to hold back three paintings from this batch in order to save money on postage, The Starry Night was one of the paintings he did not send. Finally, in a letter to painter Émile Bernard from late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure."

Van Gogh argued with Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin as to whether one should paint from nature, as Van Gogh preferred, or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions": paintings conceived in the imagination, or de tête. In the letter to Bernard, Van Gogh recounted his experiences when Gauguin lived with him for nine weeks in the autumn and winter[clarification needed ] of 1888: "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as you know. . . . But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall. . . And yet, once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big-another failure-and I have had my fill of that." Van Gogh here is referring to the expressionistic swirls which dominate the upper center portion of The Starry Night.

Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight [ The Starry Night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things." Vincent responded in early November, "Despite what you say in your previous letter, that the search for style often harms other qualities, the fact is that I feel myself greatly driven to seek style, if you like, but I mean by that a more manly and more deliberate drawing. If that will make me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But am inclined to believe that in the long run you'd get used to it." And later in the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the last consignment weren't what they ought to become, however I dare urge you to believe that in landscapes one will continue to mass things by means of a drawing style that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses."

But although Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them and continued with his preferred method of painting from nature. Like the impressionists he had met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh also favored working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to this latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles.

Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888, oil on canvas

The nocturne series was limited by the difficulties posed by painting such scenes from nature, i.e., at night. The first painting in the series was Café Terrace at Night, painted in Arles in early September 1888, followed by Starry Night (Over the Rhône) later that same month. Van Gogh's written statements concerning these paintings provide further insight into his intentions for painting night studies in general and The Starry Night in particular.

Soon after his arrival in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo, "I need a starry night with cypresses or-perhaps above a field of ripe wheat; there are some really beautiful nights here." That same week, he wrote to Bernard, "A starry sky is something I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions." He compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on Earth, "we take death to reach a star." Although at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, he appears not to have lost his belief in an afterlife. He voiced this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after having painted Starry Night Over the Rhône, confessing to a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word-for religion-so I go outside at night to paint the stars."

He wrote about existing in another dimension after death and associated this dimension with the night sky. "It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies." "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out that "earth is a planet too, and consequently a star, or celestial orb." And he stated flatly that The Starry Night was "not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas."

Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood." Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content" of the work makes reference to the New Testament Book of Revelation, revealing an " apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon." (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in Landscape with Olive Trees, painted at the same time and often regarded as a pendant to The Starry Night.)

Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" which "was conceived in a state of great agitation." He writes of the "hallucinatory character of the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns. Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman. He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity." Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision and advances his own symbolist theory with reference to the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament Book of Genesis. Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."

The drawing Cypresses in Starry Night, a reed pen copy executed by Van Gogh after the painting in 1889. Originally held at Kunsthalle Bremen, today part of the disputed Baldin Collection.[55][56]

Art historian Lauren Soth also finds a symbolist subtext in The Starry Night, saying that the painting is a "traditional religious subject in disguise" and a "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] deepest religious feelings." Citing Van Gogh's avowed admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian blue and citron yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes that Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in The Starry Night. He criticizes Schapiro's and Loevgren's biblical interpretations, dependent as they are on a reading of the crescent moon as incorporating elements of the Sun. He says it is merely a crescent moon, which, he writes, also had symbolic meaning for Van Gogh, representing "consolation."

It is in light of such symbolist interpretations of The Starry Night that art historian Albert Boime presents his study of the painting. As noted above, Boime has proven that the painting depicts not only the topographical elements of Van Gogh's view from his asylum window but also the celestial elements, identifying not only Venus but also the constellation Aries. He suggests that Van Gogh originally intended to paint a gibbous moon but "reverted to a more traditional image" of the crescent moon, and theorizes that the bright aureole around the resulting crescent is a remnant of the original gibbous version. He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne as possible inspiration for his belief in an afterlife on stars or planets. And he provides a detailed discussion of the well-publicized advances in astronomy that took place during Van Gogh's lifetime.

Boime asserts that while Van Gogh never mentioned astronomer Camille Flammarion in his letters, he believes that Van Gogh must have been aware of Flammarion's popular illustrated publications, which included drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were then called) as seen and photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets the swirling figure in the central portion of the sky in The Starry Night to represent either a spiral galaxy or a comet, photographs of which had also been published in popular media. He asserts that the only non-realistic elements of the painting are the village and the swirls in the sky. These swirls represent Van Gogh's understanding of the cosmos as a living, dynamic place.

Harvard astronomer Charles A. Whitney conducted his own astronomical study of The Starry Night contemporaneously with but independent of Boime (who spent almost his entire career at U.C.L.A.). While Whitney does not share Boime's certainty with regard to the constellation Aries, he concurs with Boime on the visibility of Venus in Provence at the time the painting was executed. He also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy in the sky, although he gives credit for the original to Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, whose work Flammarion reproduced.

Sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy by Lord Rosse in 1845, 44 years before Van Gogh's painting

Whitney also theorizes that the swirls in the sky could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty-seven months he spent in Provence. (It was the mistral which triggered his first breakdown after entering the asylum, in July 1889, less than a month after painting The Starry Night.) Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the horizon show the first light of morning.

The village has been variously identified as either a recollection of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland, or based on a sketch he made of the town of Saint-Rémy. In either case, it is an imaginary component of the picture, not visible from the window of the asylum bedroom.

Cypress trees have long been associated with death in European culture, though the question of whether Van Gogh intended for them to have such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is the subject of an open debate. In an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred to "funereal cypresses," though this is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows." One week after painting The Starry Night, he wrote to his brother Theo, "The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them." In the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypresses of that difficult shade of bottle green." These statements suggest that Van Gogh was interested in the trees more for their formal qualities than for their symbolic connotation.

Schapiro refers to the cypress in the painting as a "vague symbol of a human striving." Boime calls it the "symbolic counterpart of Van Gogh's own striving for the Infinite through non-orthodox channels." Art historian Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Van Gogh the cypresses "function as rustic and natural obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth." (Some commentators see one tree, others see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."

Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage of separate motifs," The Starry Night "is overtly stamped as an ' abstraction'." Pickvance claims that cypress trees were not visible facing east from Van Gogh's room, and he includes them with the village and the swirls in the sky as products of Van Gogh's imagination. Boime asserts that the cypresses were visible in the east, as does Jirat-Wasiutyński. Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith concur, saying that Van Gogh "telescoped" the view in certain of the pictures of the view from his window, and it stands to reason that Van Gogh would do this in a painting featuring the Morning Star. Such a compression of depth serves to enhance the brightness of the planet.

Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgam of images." However, it is by no means certain that Van Gogh was using "arrangement" as a synonym for "composition." Van Gogh was, in fact, speaking of three paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when he made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud and background of mountains, as well as the Moonrise and the Night effect," as he called it, "these are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts." The first two pictures are universally acknowledged to be realistic, non-composite views of their subjects. What the three pictures do have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style [that] takes away the real sentiment of things" in The Starry Night.

On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term. In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better." (The painting he is referring to is La Berceuse, which is a realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin with an imaginative floral background.) And to Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour so naively distinguished. Ah, you're exchanging that for something-must one say the word-something artificial-something affected."

While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy. "Not the kind," they write, "known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse ('the falling sickness', as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy-a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior." Symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain."

Van Gogh experienced his second breakdown in seven months in July 1889. Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of this breakdown were present when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, that in giving himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached." On that day in mid-June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all the other elements of the painting in place, Van Gogh threw himself into the painting of the stars, producing, they write, "a night sky unlike any other the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes."

After having initially held it back, Van Gogh sent The Starry Night to Theo in Paris on 28 September 1889, along with nine or ten other paintings. Theo died less than six months after Vincent, in January 1891. Theo's widow Jo became the caretaker of Van Gogh's legacy. In Paris in 1900 she sold the painting to poet Julien Leclercq. In 1901 Leclercq sold it to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker. Jo bought the painting back from Schuffenecker and in 1906 sold it to the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by Georgette P. van Stolk, of Rotterdam, who sold it to Paul Rosenberg, of Paris and New York. It was through Rosenberg that the Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting in 1941.

The painting was investigated by the scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and for the stars and the moon, Van Gogh employed the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.

Boime, Albert (December 1984). "Van Gogh's Starry Night: A History of Matter and a Matter of History" (PDF). Arts Magazine. 59 (4): 86-103. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 November 2018.

De La Faille, Jacob Baart (1970). The works of Vincent van Gogh (3rd ed.). Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. OCLC 300160639.

Ives, Colta; Stein, Susan Alyson; van Heugten, Sjraar; Vellekoop, Marije (2005). Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-1588391650.

Hulsker, Jan (1986). The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches. New York, NY: Harrison House/Harry N. Abrams Distributed by Crown Publishers, Random House. ISBN 0-517-44867-X.

Jirat-Wasiutynski, Vojtech (December 1993). "Vincent van Gogh's Paintings of Olive Trees and Cypresses from St.-Remy". Art Bulletin. 75 (4): 647-670. doi:10.2307/3045988. JSTOR 3045988.

Loevgren, Sven (1971). The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and French Symbolism in the 1880s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0253325600.

Naifeh, Steven and Gregory White Smith (2011). Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-50748-9.

Pickvance, Ronald (1984). Van Gogh in Arles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0-87099-376-3.

Pickvance, Ronald (1986). Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers (exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Abrams. ISBN 0-87099-477-8.

Soth, Lauren (June 1986). "Van Gogh's Agony". Art Bulletin. 68 (2): 301. doi:10.1080/00043079.1986.10788341.

Whitney, Charles A. (September 1986). "The Skies of Vincent van Gogh". Art History. 9 (3): 351-362. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.1986.tb00206.x.

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The Starry Night ( Dutch: De sterrennacht) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.

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Rene Magritte

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L’homme au chapeau melon (no border) by Rene Magritte - art print from King & McGaw

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L’homme au chapeau melon (no border) by Rene Magritte. King & McGaw has an extensive collection of art prints by established and emerging artists, which are all framed by hand in the UK.

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Claude Monet-popy field

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Anyone who's taken even the most rudimentary art history class can tell you that each artistic period is led by a handful of artists whose names become synonymous with the movement they champion. And perhaps the easiest example of this is Claude Monet. Of course, it doesn't take any sort of class to know the name Monet. Beyond his invaluable contributions to impressionist art, Monet has gone on to become one of the most famous artists of all time. And his favorite muse, flowers, went along with him for every step of the journey.

Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris, France. Monet's father, Adolphe worked in the family shipping business while his mother, Louise, kept the home. When Monet was five the family moved from Paris to Le Havre, a port town in the Normandy region. Monet was a decent student, but much preferred to be outdoors than cooped up in a classroom. He also discovered his love of drawing at an early age. A local landscape artist, Eugene Boudin, introduced Monet to painting, otherwise known as painting outdoors. Monet had found a way to combine his two favorite pastimes. He never looked back.

In his early 20s, Monet moved back to Paris. Like many young artists of the day, he spent his days surrounding himself with art at The Louvre. But, unlike his contemporaries, Monet wasn't interested in refining his craft by copying the works of masters. Instead, he spent his days painting what he could see out the window.

In 1861 Monet was drafted into Foreign Service and spent a year serving in Algiers. After leaving the service, he returned to Paris and threw himself back into the art world. He joined the private studio of Charles Gleyre and shared studio space with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederique Bazille and Alfred Sisley.
Impressionism
Monet and his new friends, who also enjoyed painting and creating outdoors, became disillusioned with the art being pushed by the prestigious art schools of the day. During this time period, the highest honor an artist could hope for would be to have their work chosen for the exhibition by the Salon de Paris, the greatest art event of the Western World. Monet did have two pieces chosen for exhibition in 1865 ( La femme à la robe verte or The Woman in the Green Dress and a small landscape), but by and large, the Salon did not appreciate the new style Monet and his colleagues were experimenting with.

The accepted art of the time, the realism period, focused on life-like representations of everyday life. Impressionism, on the other hand, is about understanding the way light affects objects and color. And this was what fascinated Monet the most. He was so intent on depicting scenes as they related to light that he often painted the same scene over and over again in varying light so that it could be, in his eyes, fully represented.

Frustrated by the lack of support from the largest authority in the art community, Monet and his friends decided to stage their own show, the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, in 1874. At this first show, Monet exhibited, among others, Impression, soleil levant ( Impression, Sunrise ). It was from this painting's title that the art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "impressionism" to describe not only Monet's art but also the entire movement he was representing. Though the term was meant as dismissive, the artists embraced the title; taking an insult and turning it into art history.
Clos Normand Garden at Giverny
In 1879, Monet's wife and frequent muse Camille died of uterine cancer, leaving Monet extremely distraught. However, after several difficult months, Monet began to create some of the greatest works of his career and perhaps of the 19 th century.

In 1883 Monet moved his family to Giverny. The property at Giverney included a house, a barn used as a studio, orchards, and a garden. Monet spent much time designing and enjoying his garden, building it up as his fame increased and his fortune rose.

The main garden, known as Clos Normand, stretches 100 acres and Monet designed it to be a garden of perspectives, symmetries, and colors. Monet divided the land into flower beds set at varying heights and covered the central alleyway with iron arches for climbing roses. He was interested in common, organized gardens and instead chose to pair according to color, daisies, and poppies next to rare flowers, and allowed them to grow freely.

Ten years after he first moved to Giverney, Monet bought another piece of land adjacent to his own and began work on what would become the inspiration for his lasting legacy.

The Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny by Claude Monet
The Water Lilies
For his water garden, Monet took inspiration from the Japanese gardens in prints he collected. He even added a Japanese bridge; built by a local craftsman and became a centerpiece of many of Monet's later works.

Monet had the famous bridge was covered in wisterias and planted weeping willows. Of course, the real centerpiece of the garden was the water lilies. Local French white water lilies were planted along with variation imported from South America and Egypt. The mix of these different types of water lilies led to ponds dotted with yellow, blue, white, and pink.

Then, after six years spent creating the garden of his dreams, Monet began to paint it. As the historians who now run his house as a museum put it, "Never before had a painter so shaped his subjects in nature before painting them. And so he created his works twice."

As he had always done, he would paint the same scene again and again, in different lights to capture its essence. He began with paintings where the Japanese bridge was the focal point and then loved onto the large-scale series of water lilies that would occupy the next 20 years of his life and become his most well-known works.

( Water Lilies ) consists of around 250 oil paintings of Monet's lily pond. Staying true to his impressionistic roots, the paintings vary between almost lifelike representations to practically abstract. It should be noted, however, that Monet's eyesight, while never great, was deteriorating rapidly at this time.

In 1923 Monet had two surgeries to remove cataracts. His paintings of the water lilies before and after his surgery are noticeably changed. Because people with cataracts perceive red easier than other colors, the paintings were done before the surgeries have a general reddish tone. After the surgeries, when he was able to see a wider range of ultraviolet wavelengths his paintings took on a bluer hue. In fact, he even went back and repainted some of his earlier work in include more blue water lilies.

In 1926, at age 86, Monet died of lung cancer. Monet's only son and heir, Michel, gave his home and garden at Giverney to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1966. The estate had fallen into disrepair following WWII and it took almost ten years to restore the garden and house to the level Monet had kept them at.

Today, Monet's home and garden in Giverny exist as a museum and people come from all over the world to walk among the types of flowers Monet himself picked out and gaze at the lily pond that inspired hundreds of masterpieces. Monet's paintings hang in museums across the globe, but it's only in Giverny that people can see the works he created first.

For more information on the impact of florals on impressionism, check out Chrysanthemums Crush It In Impressionist Paintings.
https://www.biography.com/people/claude-monet-9411771 https://www.claude-monet.com/ http://giverny.org/gardens/fcm/visitgb.htm
Clos Normand Image Source (resized):

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

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How Monet Featured His Floral Muses in Paintings

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Claude Monet has gone on to become one of the most famous artists of all time, making an impact especially in the field of impressionist art. His favorite muse, flowers, went along with him for every step of his artistic journey.

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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Portre 25 Poster Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Portre 25 Fotoğraf Baskısı, Posteri, Tuval, Kanvas Tablo, Afiş Baskı, Yüksek Çözünürlüklü Resim Satışı, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk posteri, tuval kanvas tablo baskı, forex plastik baskı ya da yükse

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Pablo Picasso

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Crying Woman (Ağlayan Kadın)

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Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne ,1917, (downloaded from cultura.biografieonline.it)

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Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–19 (downloaded from timeout.com)

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Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–19 (downloaded from timeout.com)

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THE BIRTH OF VENUS- Sandro Botticelli, 1485-1486, The Birth of Venus (downloaded from Wikimedia Commons)