On 11 November, Le bassin aux nymphéas will be offered in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale at Christie’s in New York.
Claude Monet's (1840-1926), Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1917-19. Oil on canvas. 39 3/4 x 79 in (100.7 x 200.8 cm) Estimate: $30,000,000-50,000,000.
On 24 June 2008 Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas, sold for almost £41 million at Christie's in London, almost double the estimate of £18 to £24 million.
I do not have long to live, and I must dedicate all my time to painting,’ wrote Claude Monet in a 1918 letter to the Parisian art dealer, Georges Bernheim. ‘I don’t want to believe that I would ever be obliged to leave Giverny; I’d rather die here in the middle of what I have done.’
Monet would survive these words by a number of years, but they reflect his precarious state of mind in the summer when he was working on LeBassin aux nymphéas. He was approaching 80 — well beyond the life expectancy for men of his generation — and suffering increasingly with cataracts in both eyes. The First World War was also entering its final phase, the Germans recently having launched their Ludendorff Offensive on the Western Front: a last-ditch effort at victory before newly-arriving US troops could be fully deployed on the Allied side.The Germans’ advance was swift and effective, with Paris now within reach of their long-range guns. As, just about, was the village of Giverny, located slightly to the west of the French capital and a place Monet had called home since 1883.
Monet was an avid gardener, and much of his time at Givernywas spent in his sizeable garden. Peonies and red geraniums jostled for attention with pansies and yellow roses. His most famous horticultural feat, though, was creating a water garden, complete with a lily-covered pond, which, over the decades, he’d paint around 250 times.
By the turn of the 20th century, the pond became the almost-exclusive subject of Monet’s art, inspiring an outpouring of creativity that, for many, marks the summit of his career. A 1909 exhibition of 48 of his water-lily paintings, at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, left art critics purring at how close to abstraction they looked. ‘His vision is increasingly limiting itself to the minimum of tangible realities, in order… to magnify the impression of the imponderable,’ wrote Jean Morgan in daily newspaper, Le Gaulois.
Monet wasn’t an artist to rest on his laurels or repeat past successes, however, and in 1918 he ordered a set of 20 large canvases in elongated, horizontal format (roughly a metre high by more than two metres wide). He duly began work on a new, compositionally connected group of paintings, where lily pads are clustered towards the lateral edges and a burst of sunlight makes its way in a vertical band down the centre, before spillingout into a broad pool at the bottom.
He’d complete 14 works of this type, Le Bassin aux nymphéas among them. In that particular painting, he unified the scene’s elements by adopting a diaphanous veil of colour all over, laid down with a light, transparent touch.
Monet wasn’t an artist to rest on his laurels or repeat past successes, however, and in 1918 he ordered a set of 20 large canvases in elongated, horizontal format (roughly a metre high by more than two metres wide). He duly began work on a new, compositionally connected group of paintings, where lily pads are clustered towards the lateral edges and a burst of sunlight makes its way in a vertical band down the centre, before spillingout into a broad pool at the bottom.
He’d complete 14 works of this type, Le Bassin aux nymphéas among them. In that particular painting, he unified the scene’s elements by adopting a diaphanous veil of colour all over, laid down with a light, transparent touch.
‘Monet saw the canvases as forerunners... of his late, water-lily Grandes Décorations’ — Paul Hayes Tucker, curatorFor Paul Hayes Tucker, the curator of a number of exhibitions on the French master, including Monet in the 20th Century at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Royal Academy of Arts, London, in the late 1990s, ‘this [suite of] canvases has a physical and emotional expansiveness’ that earlier water-lily paintings lacked.
Work on them proceeded rapidly, and in August 1918 Monet invited the dealer René Gimpel to Giverny for a private viewing. An enthused Gimpel remarked that ‘it was as though [he] were present at one of the first hours of the birth of the world.’ He saw neither horizon nor shore, being thrown into the midst of a seemingly limitless scene ‘without beginning or end.’
Twelve of the 14 paintings are extant today, the most recent example to appear on the market — another LeBassin aux nymphéas— fetching £40.9 million ($80.4 million) at auction in 2008, which at the time represented a new world auction record for the artist.
According to Tucker, there’s a final reason the 14 works are important: the likelihood that ‘Monet saw the canvases as forerunners... of his late, water-lily Grandes Décorations’. Monet completed this ensemble of 22 mural-sized paintings shortly before his death in 1926 and donated them to the French state. Totalling more than 90 metres in length, they boast the same elongated, horizontal format as Le Bassin aux nymphéas (albeit on a larger scale)and are displayed, as per the artist’s wishes, like a panoramic frieze, wrapped around a circular room.
‘Between the winter of 1886 and the summer of 1887 Van Gogh effectively crossed the divide into contemporary art.’ – Richard Kendall, art historianand curator at large at the Clark Art Institute
Vincent Van Gogh, Coin de jardin avec papillons, oil on canvas, 1887
Presented at auction for the first time, Coin de jardin avec papillons possesses a sweeping exhibition history. Most recently, it was exhibited as a focal point of ‘Van Gogh & Japan,’ a travelling exhibition that explored the artist’s fascination with Japonism, and the significant impact it had on his work. ‘Van Gogh and Japan’ toured to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto throughout 2017 and 2018. Van Gogh’s Coin de jardin avec papillons will return to Japan once again for a presale exhibition at Christie’s Tokyo from 10-11 October.
David Kleiweg de Zwaan, Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s, remarked: “The two years that Van Gogh spent in Paris, from March 1886 until February 1888, represent a pivotal period in his career, during which he assimilated a host of diverse artistic currents and forged a deeply personal style. With its range of creative influences, from pointillism to Japanese prints, the present painting exemplifies the experimental zeal of the era. Van Gogh’s Coin de jardin avec papillons is a key example of his innovative and radical style.”
‘What people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity,’ wrote an exhilarated Van Gogh to his sister Wil in the summer of 1887. The cause of the Dutch painter’s excitement was the discovery of a groundbreaking new art movement that had exploded onto the Parisian art scene in the 1870s. ‘In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Now I have seen them and though not being one of their club yet I have admired certain Impressionist pictures.’
Out went the earthy tones and studied gravity and in came a series of richly-coloured landscapes and still lifes alive with the spontaneity of plein air painting, and the stylistic influence of Japanese wood block prints. As he studied the colour theories and gestures promoted by artists like Georges Seurat, his brushstrokes became looser and his palette became brighter.
Executed between May and June 1887, Coin de jardin avec papillons marks this crucial turning point in the artist’s career. Painted at a time when experiments in photography were pushing the boundaries of pictorial conventions, it is nature in close-up — a profound departure from the traditional landscape. At its centre, six butterflies dart between the foliage, their wings iridescent spots of white and red.
Interestingly, the park Van Gogh used for Coin de jardin avec papillons was in Asnières, a small Paris suburb on the banks of the Seine, which in the mid-1800s became a popular destination with day-trippers. Here, Van Gogh became acquainted with many of the younger Post-Impressionists, including Emile Bernard and Paul Signac. They inspired him to adopt some of their experimental techniques, particularly Pointillism, which Van Gogh had first encountered at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886.
Yet Van Gogh was never one for structure or rules. Under his brush, Seurat’s neatly ordered dots were willfully slackened and applied with a furious intensity. What Seurat thought of Van Gogh’s very personal twist on his invention is not known, but it did not seem to bother Signac, who became a friend of Van Gogh’s and was intrigued by his feverish passions.
As the summer came to an end, Van Gogh’s attention turned south, toward Arles. Coin de jardin avec papillons anticipates the garden paintings he would make in the asylum at St Rémy in 1888 following a mental breakdown, and the butterflies are a fitting metaphor for the fragility of his own life.
In the Van Gogh & Japan exhibition catalogue, art historian Cornelia Homburg describes Coin de jardin avec papillons, stating: “There are no other fully fledged works from Paris that show a similarly concentrated focus and attention to detail as in this extraordinary canvas.”
Originally held in the collections of Theo van Gogh and his descendants, Coin de jardin avec papillons also belonged to Joseph Reinach, the 19th-century French journalist and politician best known as the public champion of artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus.