Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (37 page)

Ryerson and Hutchinson had plans for an even greater opportunity to celebrate French culture. In the summer of 1920, the sixty-four-year-old Ryerson came to France and, accompanied by Caroline and Hutchinson’s wife, Frances, made his way to Giverny. Also present were a curator from the Art Institute and an architect.
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This small but high-powered delegation was determined to purchase for the Art Institute no fewer than thirty of Monet’s large paintings of his lily pond for installation in the museum in a space specially prepared to display them. A Chicago newspaper later reported that Monet was offered $3 million—the equivalent of 45 million francs—for thirty paintings.
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This figure was certainly mistaken, for it dwarfed the total amount, $1.15 million, that Ryerson had donated to the University of Chicago for the construction of its laboratory and other facilities.
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It would have meant he intended to pay $100,000 (1.5 million francs) per panel, a sum vastly in excess of what Monet’s paintings went for. (A few months earlier, Monet informed a would-be buyer that his canvases went for “around 25,000 francs.”)
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A more likely sum was 3 million francs ($200,000) for thirty large-scale paintings, meaning that Ryerson was offering 100,000 francs ($6,666) for each. This was a large but plausible sum given the sheer size of the canvases as well as the tremendous wealth of Ryerson.

Monet had yards aplenty of painted canvas by the summer of 1920. He could quite easily have satisfied Ryerson’s wishes, banked the heftiest paycheck of his entire career, and still retained enough work to make a sizable donation to the State. By this point, his Grande Décoration comprised, in the estimate of Lucien Descaves, a total of 170 meters
(186 yards) of canvas, while the journalist Arsène Alexandre speculated that he had done enough work to decorate fifteen rooms.
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In a moment of sober reflection that summer Monet had asked another visitor as together they surveyed the immense expanses of canvas: “Do you not think that I was completely mad to paint all of this, because what the devil can be done with it all?”
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The American collector and philanthropist Martin Ryerson at Giverny in the summer of 1920

However, Monet once again flatly refused to entertain thoughts of parting with any of the Grande Décoration. The Chicago newspaper later attributed this demurral to what it regarded as the painter’s baffling and contrary personality, rehashing the story about how in 1908 he had destroyed $100,000 worth of his own paintings. It also claimed by way of explanation that he had few friends and “led a hermitlike existence, barring his beautiful home to journalists, critics, and photographers.”
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In fact, journalists, critics and photographers were regular visitors to Giverny, and Monet had no shortage of friends despite the recent predations of the Grim Reaper. But the rebuff to Ryerson is perplexing nonetheless. He may have been reluctant for even more of his paintings to cross the Atlantic to grace the walls of homes and museums in the United States. As early as 1885, before enjoying any international success, he had expressed regret at his paintings leaving France “for the land of the Yankees,” saying that he would rather have them remain in Paris, “because there and only there is there still a little taste.”
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Undoubtedly, Monet entertained a disagreeable streak of anti-Americanism. His dislike of the prewar American residents of Giverny—among whom his
reputation for boorishness was well-known—stretched across the ocean to include their compatriots at home. Unlike Bénédite with his affectionate view of Americans as noble and generous friends of French culture, Monet believed his popularity in the United States merely proved “the stupidity of the public.”

In fairness to Monet, he wished the Grande Décoration to remain in France—above all, in Paris—for reasons that were patriotic as much as they were snobbish. As he explained to a visitor that summer: “It bothered me to think that all my work might leave my country...I need a location within Paris itself.”
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But in his deflection of this delegation from Chicago there can also be seen a further symptom of his extreme reluctance to part with these works on which he had spent so much time and exhausted so much energy.

AN EVEN CLEARER
indication of Monet’s reluctance to part with his latest paintings came later that month. With Clemenceau no longer in government, informal negotiations for the donation were being handled by the art critic François Thiébault-Sisson, a friend of the new prime minister, Alexandre Millerand. Monet informed him that he would donate his paintings to the state only if two conditions were met. The first was that he would be allowed to keep his canvases “until the end,” ensuring they would not be removed from his studio until he died. Second, he would need to see and approve the place where they were to hang and how they would be displayed. “This is for me,” he told Thiébault-Sisson, “an unalterable decision.”
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Negotiations soon began to falter, especially when Thiébault-Sisson moved into the Hôtel Baudy in Giverny and became a constant pestering presence. Not only did Monet resist handing over any of his paintings, he was also wary of having his donation publicized. “Please do not talk to anyone about what I’ve written to you regarding my decorations,” he wrote to Thiébault-Sisson in July. “Don’t give any more publicity to this matter, since this bothers me beyond imagining and I have no desire to hear about it. I want to be calm in order to work...I have no time to waste right now.”
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Monet clearly did not wish to be pressurized by having the attentions of the press turned on his donation.

Clearly the gift to the nation had gone well beyond the two paintings selected by Clemenceau in November 1918. What had yet to be determined was exactly which and how many canvases would constitute this donation. There was no shortage of candidates, and so it must have come as a surprise to those, such as Thiébault-Sisson, who had seen some six thousand square feet of painted canvas in Monet’s studio, to learn that the Grande Décoration was not yet finished and that, incredibly, even more canvases were being produced in a seemingly unstoppable tide of color. Monet wrote to Geffroy in June complaining of problems with his eyesight but claiming that he was conserving his forces and “working constantly” on the Grande Décoration. To Thiébault-Sisson he wrote that “at this time I think of nothing but work...I’m at an age where I can’t afford to lose a minute.”
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Like a shark that would drown if it stopped swimming, Monet seemed to believe that he would die if he stopped painting. By the summer of 1920 it was clear that he would be painting the Grande Décoration “until the end.”

Although not eager to part with his paintings or have his donation publicized, Monet was still keen to enjoy the perks of working for the state. In the muggy heat of July he penned a letter to Étienne Clémentel to safeguard a supply of coal for the winter. “If the State wishes me to work for it,” he informed Clémentel, “it must provide me the means, and you, my dear friend, are the only one I can count on.” He asked for the coal to be supplied, as before, by a collier in Rouen—and he informed Clémentel that he would need ten tons.
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MONET’S TRIPS INTO
Paris were becoming ever more infrequent. By the summer of 1920 more than three years had passed since he visited the city. At the end of 1919 he confessed: “I don’t think I shall ever go back.” To Geffroy he wrote in the summer of 1920: “Naturally, I don’t budge from here, and surely I never shall.”
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In fact, since his visit to the Normandy coast in the autumn of 1917, he traveled no further than the occasional jaunt to Versailles to have lunch with Clémentel and visit a plant nursery.

Clemenceau, on the other hand, was traveling the world. In February, barely a fortnight after his ouster, he had departed on a twelve-week trip
to Egypt, visiting Cairo, Alexandria, the Nile valley, and Egyptian Sudan. From Luxor he wrote jauntily: “Claude Monet, my good friend, what are you doing on the Seine when here, with each passing moment, the Nile plays with the sky and the mountains of Thebes an opera of light that would make you perfectly crazy.”
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There was no chance that Monet would ever set sail for Egypt, but Clemenceau, on his return to France, had hopes of luring Monet from Giverny. “It’s not good to retreat into your shell,” he told him.
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To that end, in August he sent Monet a railway timetable for the journey between Giverny and the far-distant village of Saint-Vincent-sur-Jard, near the coastal resort of Les Sables-d’Olonne, on France’s Atlantic coast, 280 miles southwest of Paris.

Clemenceau had put his weekend cottage in Bernouville up for sale. At the end of 1919, on a holiday in the Vendée, near where his childhood had been spent, he happened upon a little beachfront house that he came to call (with no false modesty)
la bicoque
(the shack). Known as Belébat, the house was owned by the local squire, Amedée Luce de Trémont, who lived nearby in a more stately pile, the Château de la Guignardière. An ardent Catholic and royalist, Trémont nonetheless greatly admired Clemenceau, offering to give him use of the property for free. When Clemenceau insisted on paying, they agreed on a rent of 150 francs per year, which was to be donated to the poor.
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Clemenceau moved into Belébat in August, taking possession of what he called “my sky, my sea, and my sand.”
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He quickly wrote to Monet, sending him the timetable and encouraging him to visit. Knowing that the best way to his friend’s heart was through his stomach, he tried to tempt him with some of the local cuisine, a cabbage soup: “Consider that if you don’t come you will never taste
le bouillon des choux-rèbes
.”
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But Monet showed no signs of stirring from Giverny. “I’m at war with nature and time,” he wrote that August, “and I’d like to finish some paintings I’ve started.”
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Soon afterward, Clemenceau once again set off for foreign parts, this time to Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and India. The latter visit was at the behest of the maharajah of Bikaner, who had invited him to hunt his namesakes in the jungles of Rajasthan.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A GRAND DONATION

ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1920,
Paul Léon, the newly appointed director-general of fine arts, traveled to Giverny in the company of Raymond Koechlin. The forty-six-year-old Léon described himself as “a kind of jack-of-all trades” whose new job gave him responsibility not only for purchases of paintings by the state but also for the construction and upkeep of concert halls and museums, and for the restoration of historic buildings.
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He was an expert on France’s historic monuments—especially those damaged or destroyed during the war—and the author of a recent article on the reconstruction of Reims. For several years he had been vigorously promoting his restoration work in Reims as a propaganda tool against what he called the ravages of German barbarism.
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However, discussions that afternoon did not, apparently, touch on Monet’s erstwhile commission to paint the cathedral of Reims, a project in which Léon appears to have had no involvement.
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Instead, over a lunch of roast chicken and veal risotto served by a butler dressed all in white, the three men reached a decision regarding Monet’s donation to the state of canvases from his Grande Décoration. “I’m going to give the Hôtel Biron twelve of my last decorative canvases,” Monet explained to René Gimpel a short time later. However, there was an important stipulation: “They’ll have to build the room as I want it, according to my plan,” Monet stressed, “and the pictures will leave my house only when I am satisfied with the arrangements.”
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