Claude Monet was, it is fair to say, obsessed with the theme of impermanence. He had been painting, for example, the same haystack, over and over again: in sunlight at different times of day, through sunlit mist, at sunset, in the snow under a gray sky. With his water-garden, Monet now brought to his theme of impermanence the theme of regeneration. The life cycle of the water lily is a cycle of renewal. Rising from the mud to the surface of the water, water lilies open to the sun during the day. Every evening the luminous blossoms are pulled back beneath the water where they lie submerged until the next morning, when they re-emerge and open once more. Once fertilized, the flower stays underwater, where the seeds ripen and are released three weeks later. The seed pods float back to the surface, where they drift until they settle back into the mud to regenerate in another place. "I would like…," Monet told Gustave Geffroy, "when I die, to be buried in a buoy." Water became Monet's favorite subject. In paintings of his water-garden, he was able to combine the fleetingness of light and clouds reflected in water with the glowing colors of his water lilies, symbolizing the "unknown realities" of regeneration. "Last Reverie before the Watergarden" is the title of the final chapter of Gustave Geffroy's 1922 monograph, Claude Monet: His Life, His Times, His Work. This book pleased Monet: he wrote Geffroy after reading it, "I have no need to tell you how touched I am, all modesty apart, by the good you say concerning my works and myself." "Last Reverie before the Watergarden" begins: "This is the supreme significance of Monet's art, his adoration of the universe, ending in a pantheistic and Buddhist contemplation. …pursuing his dream of form and color almost to the annihilation of his individuality in the eternal nirvana of things at once changing and immutable." Geffroy was not the only contemporary writer to see Buddhism in
the art of Monet. The art historian Louis Gillet wrote soon after
Monet's death: "It is perhaps necessary to see in [Monet's
art] the sole European work which is truly related to Chinese thought,
to the vague hymns of the Far East on the waters and the mists and
the passing of things, on detachment, on nirvana, on the religion
of the Lotus." Although this perspective on Monet and his work
has been lost today, the paintings of Claude Monet may yet be the
most eloquent Western expression of the Buddhist concepts of impermanence
and the interdependence of all things, concepts that proved so troublesome
to his more scholarly contemporaries.
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