Claude Monet: Nymphéas

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Christie’s is honoured to present Claude Monet’s seminal Nymphéas. Created 125 years ago, it had remained in the Monet family for many years and is now being offered from a distinguished private collection. This masterpiece is making its first appearance at auction and is one of the highlights of the 20^th/ 21^st Century Inaugural Evening Sale at The Henderson on 26 September. It is one of the very first of Monet’s works to take as its subject, his beloved water-lily pond at his Giverny home. Notably, four other works from this pioneering Nymphéas series are owned by renowned museums worldwide today, including the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Kagoshima City Museum of Art, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, underscoring the exceptional rarity and calibre of this painting.

This work and the seven other paintings from Monet’s first Nymphéas series vary in format, size, colour, and handling as Monet revelled in the myriad of pictorial potentials of this novel motif. Immersing the viewer in a shimmering aquatic world, Nymphéas is a sublime work from this pioneering series, marking Monet’s early explorations of the theme that would come to dominate his production in the twentieth century. This painting introduces one of the most important and radical aspects of Monet’s Nymphéas – the elimination of a horizon line. His tightly focused scene plunges the viewer into the centre of the pond, removing all other peripheral details to focus entirely on the constantly shifting relationships between water, atmosphere and light that transformed the pond’s surface with each passing moment. These pictorial qualities would become central to every phase of Monet’s Nymphéas series and served as key influences on subsequent generations of artists.