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Claude Monet (artist) French, 1840 - 1926 The Japanese Footbridge, 1899 oil on canvas Overall: 81.3 x 101.6 cm (32 x 40 in.) framed: 101 x 120.7 x 7.6 cm (39 3/4 x 47 1/2 x 3 in.) Gift of Victoria Nebeker Coberly, in memory of her son John W. Mudd, and Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg 1992.9.1 On View |
In 1883 Monet moved his household, his two sons along with Alice Hoschedé and her children, to the rural community of Giverny, where he leased a house that he was able to purchase seven years later. In early 1893, he acquired a swampy area across the railroad tracks abutting his property and petitioned the village council for permission to divert a small stream into it. But it was only toward the end of that decade that he turned to the garden he created there as a rich source of artistic motifs.
When Monet looked to his water garden in 1899, he painted twelve works from one single vantage point, focusing on the arching blue-green bridge and the microcosm of the water garden. Among the twelve was the National Gallery's Japanese Footbridge. Everything in the painting--from the bridge itself to the water lilies and other plantings, to the shape and even the existence of the pond--was formed by Monet. The artist, who as a leader of the impressionists had espoused the spontaneity of directly observed works that capture the fleeting effects of light and color, had in these later paintings subjected a nature he re-created to sustained, meditated scrutiny.
When Monet exhibited these paintings at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1890, a number of critics mentioned his debt to Japanese art. More telling, the impenetrable green enclosure--heightened in the National Gallery painting by the placement of the top of the bridge's arch just below the painting's top edge--harkens back to the hortus conclusus (closed garden) of medieval images, while also evoking a dreamlike contemplative zone consonant with symbolist literature, especially poems such as "Le Nénuphar blanc" by Stéphane Mallarmé. Gustave Geffroy described this effect in his review of the exhibition (Le Journal, November 26, 1900), speaking of "this minuscule pool where some mysterious corollas blossom," and "a calm pool, immobile, rigid, and deep like a mirror, upon which white water lilies blossom forth, a pool surrounded by soft and hanging greenery which reflects itself in it."
(Text by Florence E. Coman, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)
From the Tour: Claude Monet: The Series PaintingsIn the last decades of Monet's life, his prized water garden at Giverny became a subject the artist explored obsessively, painting it 250 times between 1900 and his death. Eventually, it was his only subject. He began construction of the water garden as soon as he moved to Giverny, petitioning local authorities to divert water from a nearby river. The resulting landscape was Monet's invention entirely, and he used it as his creative focus and inspiration.
The treatment of the water's surface, like the enveloppe of light and atmosphere that bathed the cathedrals and other serial subjects, unified the Giverny work. Here, the sky has disappeared from the painting; the lush foliage rises all the way to the horizon, and space is flattened by the decorative arch of the bridge. Our attention is focused onto the painting itself and held there, not drawn into the scene depicted. In later lily pond paintings, even more of the setting evaporates, and the water's surface alone occupies the entire canvas. Floating lily pads and mirrored reflections assume equal stature, blurring distinctions between solid objects and transitory effects of light. Monet had always been interested in reflections, seeing their fragmented forms as a natural equivalent for his own broken brushwork.