The Japanese Bridge at Giverny

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The Japanese Bridge at Giverny: Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - The Japanese Bridge at Giverny

Keywords: Japanese, Bridge, Giverny

Work Overview: Japanese Footbridge, Giverny
Claude Monet, French, 1840 - 1926
Geography: Made in France, Europe
Date: 1895
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 31 x 38 1/2 inches (78.7 x 97.8 cm) Framed: 36 1/2 × 44 × 3 1/2 inches (92.7 × 111.8 × 8.9 cm)
Curatorial Department: European Painting

Purchased from the artist by Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune (dealers), Paris, 1920 [1]; with Durand-Ruel, Paris 1922 and transferred to Durand-Ruel, New York, by 1934 [2]; sold to Otto Haas, Haverford, PA, 1935; by inheritance to his son Dr. F. Otto Haas, Philadelphia; gift of F. Otto Haas, and partial gift of the reserved life interest of his widow Carole Haas Gravagno to PMA, 1993. 1. See letter of Monet to Durand-Ruel, Giverny, January 17, 1920 in which he states that he left three paintings, including Le Pont, with MM Bernheim-Jeune. 2. Exhibited by Durand-Ruel, New York, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1934.

“Japanese Footbridge, Giverny” (1895), appears in “Monet's Water Lilies: An Artist's Obsession” with the artist's later, darker depiction, “The Japanese Bridge” (1923-25)

A few slow-motion collisions are a small price to pay for the intense pleasure of diving deep into the subject that occupied Claude Monet for the last 30 years of his life. In more than 250 canvases — not counting the many he deemed unacceptable and destroyed — he depicted the shimmering rafts of lotus blossoms that slowly overspread his pond. The Atheneum has gathered eight such works from across the country to add to its own prized painting, and has come up with an utterly spellbinding show.

Fans of the Impressionists know that a train ride of about an hour can take them from Paris to Giverny, where Monet lived from 1883 until he died, in 1926. They can visit his house there, and also the neighboring parcel of land he acquired in 1893 and painstakingly fashioned into a lush private park that ultimately provided employment for about half a dozen gardeners.

As detailed in the catalog that accompanies the show, Monet got permission from local authorities to divert a nearby stream and enlarge the property’s small pond. Then he built a Japanese-style footbridge. He planted irises, wisteria, weeping willows and, of course, the water lilies, known in France as nymphéas. Nymphéas, nymphéas and more nymphéas, in pinks, creams, blues, reds and yellows.

“I had planted them for pleasure,” he wrote in a letter, “and cultivated them without thinking of painting them. A landscape does not sink into you all at once.”

Indeed not. But Monet soon became obsessed with capturing the constantly shifting play of color and light in the water garden he had created. The nine paintings in “Monet’s Water Lilies” run the gamut from the traditional landscape composition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Japanese Footbridge, Giverny” (1895) to the astonishingly modern, essentially abstract clouds of color in the Museum of Modern Art’s 20-foot mural “Water Lilies” (1914). We go from looking through a window at a scene to being immersed in it, at one with the floating vegetation and reflected sky.

Observing the painter’s increasingly poetic responses to his pool, we also watch it changing. In the 1895 painting, irises are abundant, but the willows, wisteria and water lilies have yet to appear. And the bridge, arching gracefully over its own reflection, has not acquired the coat of teal green familiar from later pictures. By 1904, in “Le Bassin des Nymphéas,” clumps of water lilies in various hues are beginning to spread, and Monet paints them with dense layers of pigment that seem suspended above the more thinly applied strokes of olive and emerald water.

Despite the motif, these pictures don’t feel repetitive. There are two works dated 1914-17, but the distinct outlines and startling blue background of “Water Lilies,” on loan from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, seem only tangentially related to the blurred edges and pale tones of the privately owned “Water Lilies With Reflections of Tall Grass.” That these works are suffused with shades of blue and green will surprise no one — except perhaps those conditioned to the mauve haze of the Atheneum’s picture, “Nymphéas, Water Landscape” (1907). And the show’s 1923-25 depiction of “The Japanese Bridge,” rendered in dark, brooding hues and tangled brushwork, could be read as the complete negation of the placid, sun-drenched version painted 30 years before.

Monet’s restless quest to extract every scrap of visual information from a hopelessly unstable milieu is visible not just in these paintings but in a riveting 1915 film clip (by the French playwright, actor and filmmaker Sacha Guitry) running in the adjacent gallery. In a strikingly white suit, brushes and palette in hand, oblivious to the lengthening ash of the cigarette between his lips, Monet dabs at the canvas, then turns toward the vista of breeze-blown trees. He touches the picture again, then looks once more at the subject. As the catalog notes, there is as much looking as painting.

Although the layout of the show suggests otherwise, I recommend taking in the projections and photographs before proceeding to the paintings. Let the Debussy piano music and musty prints take you back in time. Enjoy the photos of Monet’s garden today. You think you’re seeing what he saw. But you aren’t — not until you head over to the paintings, and join all those people walking forward and back and glimpsing entire worlds in the water.

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