Monet, Claude. Water-Lilies. Los Angeles
Museum of Art: Los Angeles, CA, 1897.
The relationship between Monet’s love for Alice and his paintings of Water Lilies is understood after first examining the murky connection between the beginnings of both of these intimacies. In a sense, they both began out of rather unpleasant circumstances. Monet met Alice when he moved to Giverny in 1883 with Ernest Hoschede, his benefactor and her husband (Weekes 227). Although they were both married at the time, a romantic relationship began to bud years before their spouses died as they lived in the same house together. Around the same time, Monet purchased a plot of land equally as muddy as the initial stages of his connection to Alice. He decided to transform this barren landscape, devoid of lush foliage, into a beautiful water garden, which was completed in 1895 (Russell). Most people feel that Monet created this garden specifically so that he could observe and capture the different effects of light on nature; yet, this artistic project parallels the romance that developed and blossomed between Monet and Alice. Like the undeveloped unattractive landscape at Giverny, the paintings he produced in these early scandalous years hardly reflected any beauty of his new love for Alice. For example, in Water-Lilies (1897), no reflection of the water lilies exists, just as Monet had not yet had time to reflect upon his new budding relationship with Alice. This close up image of only a few lily pads and flowers differs greatly from his later water lily paintings in simplicity. The splendor of love had not yet engulfed him, which explains why such meager numbers, which do not even exhibit the wonderful mirror like property of the water, fail to create such a moving feeling. The lack of an overwhelmingly gorgeous amount of water lilies within his artwork was symbolic of the quite murky beginnings of his love with Alice.