Armchair Art Tour: Monet at Giverny: The Water Lilies and More

A quote from Sophocles inspired this talk: “We must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.” For Oscar Claude Monet (1840-1926), his last thirty-six years upheld his reputation, despite cataract surgeries and the loss of loved ones. During this period, he painted more abstractly, often creating series of pictures focused on the same subject, reducing details as he dramatically rendered light and atmosphere into a textured surface of harmonies and vivid contrasting colors. Monet’s last great effort was creating dozens more paintings of water lilies (he ended up producing about 250 of them during his lifetime), based on the ones thriving within his own garden in Giverny, a village fifty miles from Paris. Included in the talk are works of art from local museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Princeton Museum of Art.