Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (70 page)

11
   Hoschedé, vol. 1, p. 54.

12
   
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
, June 1909, trans. Maloon, p. 201.

13
   
Excelsior
, January 26, 1921, quoted in Shackleford et al.,
Monet and the Impressionists
, cat. 37, p. 162.

14
   Quoted in George T. M. Shackleford, “Monet and Japanese Art,” in Shackleford et al.,
Monet and the Impressionists
, p. 91.

15
   See Hidemichi Tanaka, “Cézanne and
Japonisme
,”
Artibus et Historiae
22, no. 44 (2001), pp. 201–20. Tanaka cites the work of earlier Japanese scholars such as Kazuo Fukumoto, who in the 1950s pointed out the resemblances between Cézanne and Japanese artists. Tanaka and other Japanese critics have pointed out that Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings were inspired likewise by Monet’s wheat stack paintings, “themselves influenced by Hokusai’s landscape series” (p. 203).

16
   
Le Temps
, June 7, 1904.

17
   
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 142.

18
   
Le Temps
, June 7, 1904.

19
   For this coincidence, see Wildenstein,
Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism
, p. 290.

20
   
American Art News
, January 21, 1922.

21
   
L’Homme Libre
, March 16, 1924.

22
   Ibid. This report says the episode took place “two years ago,” but Matsukata first met Monet and made his purchases in 1921.

23
   
Le Bulletin de la vie artistique
, November 15, 1921.

24
   
Le Bulletin de la vie artistique
reported that Matsukata “chose for himself...fifteen canvases from Monet at Giverny...He must have twenty-five Monets today” (December 15, 1922). The article recorded his purchases as “wheatstacks, poplars, London bridges, water lilies, snowscapes, Belle-Île landscapes.”

25
   Quoted in Horner, “Brangwyn and the Japanese Connection,” p. 75.

26
   Ibid.

27
   WL 2442.

28
   
American Art News
, January 21, 1922. Matsukata is said in this article to own twenty-five Monet paintings.

29
   WL 2437.

30
   WL 2442.

31
   WL 2435.

32
   WL 2444.

33
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 89.

34
   The
Times
, June 23, 1921.

35
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 89.

36
   
Le Petit Parisien
, October 3, 1921.

37
   Ibid., October 3, 1921.

38
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 89.

39
   Ibid., p. 119.

40
   
Le Petit Parisien
, October 1, 1921.

41
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 90.

42
   I have taken the following details from the article in
Le Petit Parisien
, October 1, 1921.

43
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, pp. 107–8.

44
   Ibid., pp. 149 and 151.

45
   Ibid., p. 89.

46
   Duroselle,
Clemenceau
, p. 900.

47
   
Le Petit Parisien
, October 1, 1921.

48
   
Lettres à une amie
, p. 323n.

49
   
Le Petit Parisien
, October 1, 1921.

50
   
Lettres à une Amie
, p. 81; and
Le Temps
, August 31, 1924.

51
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 90.

52
   Ibid., p. 91.

53
   WL 2458.

54
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 91.

55
   WL 2463.

56
   WL 2470.

57
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 94.

58
   WL 2474.

59
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 94.

60
   Ibid., p. 98.

61
   WL 2489. The phrase he uses is
que sale type je suis
.

62
   WL 2490.

63
   WL 2491.

64
   For a good discussion of the contract, see Charles F. Stuckey, “Blossoms and Blunders: Monet and the State,” Part I:
Art in America
(January–February 1979), pp. 114–15.

65
   
Georges Clemenceau à son ami Claude Monet
, p. 101.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE LUMINOUS ABYSS

1
    WL 2500.

2
    
Le Figaro
, November 19, 1922.

3
    
Claude Monet
, pp. 324 and 335.

4
    
L’Art dans les deux mondes
, March 7, 1891.

5
    
La Revue Indépendante de Littérature et d’Art
, March 1892.

6
    
Claude Monet
, pp. 335–6.

7
    
Fermes et Château
, September 1, 1908.

8
    
Claude Monet
, pp. 334 and 336.

9
    
Metamorphoses
, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1916), Book 9, line 347.

10
   William E. Ward, “The Lotus Symbol: Its Meaning in Buddhist Art and Philosophy,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
11 (December 1952), p. 136, n. 9. Ward discusses Egyptian meanings on p. 135.

11
   Marlene Dobkin de Rios, “The Influence of Psychotropic Flora and Fauna on Maya Religion”,
Current Anthropology
15 (June 1974), pp. 150–51; and Esther Pasztory, “The Iconography of the Teotihuacan Tlaloc,”
Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology
, no. 15 (1974), pp. 7 and 10.

12
   
Claude Monet, ce mal connu
, vol. 1, pp. 68–9.

13
   Maeterlinck,
The Intelligence of Flowers
, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 1907), p. 34.

14
   George Sand,
François le Champi
(Paris: Hachette, 1855), p. ii. Sand writes that
nape
was a colloquial name for “the beautiful plant called
nénuphar
or
nymphéa
,” which she speculates referred to the
napées
, mythological goddesses who presided over the meadows and forests (p. 1).

15
   L’Abbé Thiébaud,
Marie dans les Fleurs: ou, reflet symbolique des privilèges de la Sainte Vierge dans les beautés de la Nature
(Paris: Lecoffre Fils et Cie., 1867), pp. 284–5.

16
   Maurice Rollinat, “L’Étang,” in
Les névroses
(my translation).

17
   Maurice Rollinat, “L’Étang Rouge,”
En errant, proses d’un solitaire
(Paris: Charpentier, 1903) p. 132. Rollinat’s poems mentioning water lilies include “Les Yeux des Vierges” and “La Lune.”

18
   Octave Mirbeau,
Le Jardin des Supplices
(Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1899), p. 191.

19
   Ibid., p. 287.

20
   
L’Art dans les deux Mondes
, March 7, 1891.

21
   
Mercure de France
, February 1901, quoted in Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 196.

22
   Edmond Pilon,
Octave Mirbeau
(Paris: Bibliothèque Internationale), 1903, p. 8.

23
   Emily Apter, “The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau,”
October
47 (Winter, 1988), p. 106. See also Christian Limousin, “Monet au Jardin des supplices,”
Cahiers Octave Mirbeau
, Angers, no. 8 (April 2001), pp. 256–78, available online at
http://mirbeau.asso.fr/darticlesfrancais/Limousin-JDSmonet.pdf

24
   Gimpel,
Diary of an Art Dealer
, p. 58.

25
   “Le Nénuphar Blanc,” trans. Bradford Cook, in Mary Ann Caws, ed., Stéphane Mallarmé,
Selected Poetry and Prose
(New York: New Directions, 1982), p. 67.

26
   Apter, “The Garden of Scopic Perversion,” pp. 110–11.

27
   Gimpel,
Diary of an Art Dealer
, p. 339.

28
   Limousin, “Monet au Jardin des supplices,” available at
http://mirbeau.asso.fr/darticlesfrancais/Limousin-JDSmonet.pdf

29
   Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 252.

30
   Quoted in Geffroy,
Claude Monet
, p. 244.

31
   Quoted in Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 223.

32
   Robert Rey,
La Renaissance du sentiment classique dans la peinture française à la fin du 19e siècle: Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat
(Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, Édition d’Études et de Documents, 1931), pp. 136–7. Writing following Monet’s death, Rey predicted that, had the master lived another decade, these human forms would have emerged in his landscapes.

33
   
Claude Monet, ce mal connu
, vol. 1, p. 129, n. 2.

34
   Georges Cuvier,
Leçons d’anatomie comparée
, vol. 5 (Paris: Crochard, 1805), p. 122.

35
   Huysmans,
Against Nature
, trans. Robert Baldick (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), p. 67.