Silent watch of 'Water Lilies'

Hemakumar NANAYAKKARA

Claude Monet was one of the pioneers of French impressionist painting. Young Monet has been a student of Swiss born artist Charles Gleyre in Paris where he met his fellow painters Pierre-Augustine Renoir, Federic Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they formed a new movement of art, painting the effects of light in the open air with broken colours and rapid brush strokes which later became to be known as Impressionism. The term Impressionism has originated from the title of Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise.

Water Lily Pond is one of the best known collection of paintings by Claude Monet, who is regarded as the most beloved 19 th century impressionist.

The weeping willows, water lilies and the graceful arc of japanese style footbridge contributed a lot to it's beauty. Most of all the reflections of light on each individual surface made Monet's works attractive and very special. In general Monet was not concerned with drawing a specific tree, flower or any other object but always wanted to express the effect of light as he observed it through his artistic eyes or imagined a scene through his creative mind.

Monet explored the effect of light at different times of the day and seasons on the famous pond of his japanese garden at Giverny. In the final three decades of his life he worked on many paintings based on his bewitching water gardens. Many of those works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts. During that period he started to paint different versions of Water Lilies in a more abstract form. Usage of colours were more vibrant and the Lilies looked rather unrealistic.

Monet's problems with his eyesight due to the growth of cataracts in his old age also influenced his different use of colours and increasingly blurry brush strokes on his works.

Later on his eyes were operated to remove the cataracts. As a result he was able to read, yet other aspects of his vision were compromised.The colours of his paintings became much darker than the previous ones and often altered.

Cataracts badly took away his vision during the time he created most of his "Water Lilies" paintings.Still, many believe that the style he later developed to cope with his visional troubles may have created the best works of his life as a painter.

"Water Lilies" is a series of more than 250 highly admired oil paintings by Monet which are now on display at many leading museums all over the world including Musee Marmotten Monet, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York , National Gallery, London and National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

At the Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris a pair of oval rooms have been built by the French government as a permanent residence for eight Water Lily murals of Monet. Monet even provided the required specifications for those pair of oval rooms that should hold his final works of art , the two rooms were opened to the public a few months after the great artist died.

In June 2007 one of the Monet's water lily paintings was sold for £ 18.5 million at Sotherby's auction in London. One year later in June 2008 another water lily painting of Monet, "Water Lily Pond" was sold for £ 41 million at Christie's London.

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