What if during confinement, escape was just a click away? With its wonderful free visit to Monet's Water Lilies, Orangerie Museum takes you into Claude Monet's Gardens of Eden in Giverny. An enchanting break outside of time…
The Story of the Water Lilies by Claude Monet
The story of the Water Lilies of the Musée de l'Orangerie begins in Normandy, more particularly in Giverny, where Claude Monet acquired a property with a splendid garden in 1890… Driven by his fervor for botany, Monet will little by little bring his dreamlike garden. At the beginning, his “flower garden” shows extraordinary flowering when the summer comes. It is within this extraordinary garden that Claude Monet has a pond decorated with a Japanese bridge dug, gently adorning itself with aquatic plants... Here the Giverny pond is adorned “wonderful water lilies and magical Japanese irises” as Octave Mirabeau once wrote.
The Water Lilies at the Orangerie Museum
“These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession” Favorite theme of Claude Monet's work, the water lily pond gradually became his almost exclusive theme. In 1914, Claude Monet's paintings seemed to have become too narrow. In a desire for infinity for his Water Lilies, the impressionist painter offers himself a huge workshop. His artistic project? « water, water lilies, plants, but over a very large area » On a series of large panels, Claude Monet then painted an infinity of divine Water Lilies, “an endless whole, a wave without horizon and without shore” he said. At the end of the war, it was to France that Claude Monet offered his immense canvases decorated with the water lily pond... It was in 1927 that they were installed in Orangerie Museum, having never left him since…
Confinement: a splendid virtual tour of Monet's Water Lilies
At the Orangerie Museum, the spaces are lit by daylight, offering spectators a 360° vision, as if immersed in a Monet painting. While France is still confined today due to the coronavirus epidemic, the Musée de l'Orangerie offers its spectators a moment of suspended escape. In collaboration with Google Art Project, the Musée de l'Orangerie thus opens the doors of the two oval rooms of Claude Monet's Water Lilies to Internet users. During this sublime virtual tour inviting you to daydream, discover the wonderful garden of the famous impressionist painter through a thousand touches of subtle colors…A real call to escape…
