How Claude Monet's passion for plants became his crowning achievement

With little money to spare, in the 1880s his work on the garden was fitful, and in the summer months the artist acquainted himself instead with the landscape surrounding the house. It was here in the fields and water meadows around the River Epte, a tributary of the Seine, that he came across wild varieties of plants that before long would populate both his paintings and his garden: natural carpets of irises and poppies and, in particular, small white water lilies, the motif he would come to find the most beguiling of all.

In the later 1880s, on the back of successful shows in America, Monet’s fortunes finally began to rise. With more money coming in, he employed first one gardener and eventually half a dozen or more, whose labours he directed with the skill of an orchestra conductor. Work began in earnest on the garden. The gloomy cypress trees along the central Grande Allée were soon removed to open it up to light. But Alice insisted the spruces that lined the same path should stay, forcing Monet into a stealthy subterfuge: his pruning of the branches over several years caused them to suffer death by a thousand cuts, until all that remained were denuded trunks along which he trained the climbing roses that were much in vogue at the time.

By this point, Monet was an expert in horticulture as well as art. He read all the gardening journals of the day and was steadily amassing a sizeable library on plants and plantsmanship to which he would frequently refer. But he was also an aesthetic visionary with the wherewithal now to realise his most ambitious plans. The fruit trees in the orchard were gradually removed and a series of beds constructed – his ‘paintbox beds’ – each of which was planted with flowers of a single colour. These he used to study the effects of swathes of saturated colour in different conditions of light as well as the various colour vibrations that arose by placing in near proximity such vivid blocks of contrasting hues. A living experiment in the techniques the Impressionists had long espoused, it must have been aesthetically as useful as it was horticulturally original.

Always he planted with seasonal visual impact in mind, especially along the Grande Allée, where his natural fondness for the wild gardening that had become so popular during the previous decade led Monet to plant sumptuous late-summer borders of dahlias and asters, to follow the tides of tulips and irises that came in with the spring. These beds were framed by the climbing roses, which in time were trained along green metal arches replacing the eventually rotted spruce trunks. And beneath the arches, brilliant yellow and orange nasturtiums sprawled across the path as the year advanced.

In 1893, with work on the main garden well under way, Monet bought a parcel of land, including a pond, on the other side of the dirt road and railway track that ran the length of his property behind the garden wall. Beyond this new plot flowed a stream known as the Ru. He applied to the local prefect for permission to divert it into the pond so as to freshen the water. But this was refused, the local farmers fearing that the water lilies he wished to plant would poison the cattle that drank from the Ru downstream.

Swallowing his fury, Monet reapplied with reassurances for the farmers and, permission granted, set about directing the implementation of his plans. An arched bridge was constructed in close imitation of those that feature in Japanese prints by artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige, which since the 1860s Monet had devotedly collected himself. Along the banks he planted irises and agapanthus, ferns and grasses, and the first of the weeping willows that in future years would cast atmospheric shadows across both the water and his later work. He also bought the first consignment of water lilies from the nursery of Latour-Marliac, hybrids in pink and red, unprecedented colours that Monet had seen at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889; these he added to the native white varieties already growing in the pond.

By now he had also begun to paint the garden, creating images around the turn of the century of the drifts of purple irises and the almost tropical lushness of the Grande Allée. But since the beginning of the previous decade, Monet’s main interest as a painter had been a succession of large series depicting motifs found mostly in the landscape around his home – grain stacks, stands of poplars, early morning mist on the river – exploring tiny fluctuations of light and atmosphere through revelatory use of Impressionist colour that never seems more or less than what he actually saw. 

Then in 1899 and again the following year, he turned his attention to the now luscious water garden in a series of paintings of the arched bridge and the rafts of water lilies floating on the surface of the pond. By now Monet was a wealthy man. He bought more land beyond the existing pond and, following the ideas of Japanese gardening he knew so well, designed a water garden whose asymmetrical shape and subdued colour were a deliberate contrast to the flower garden close to the house.

The water-lily paintings, which in one form or another preoccupied him more or less continuously for the rest of his life, began in earnest with the images of a newly expanded pond that he painted in 1903. Over the next five years, these ‘landscapes of water and reflections’, as he called them, moved even further from direct depiction of a separate natural world towards a sense of oneness with, and immersion in, nature. By 1906, all trace of the bank or surrounding foliage had disappeared from the pictures he was making; the water lilies were now the only tangible objects by which the eye could orient itself, the sole remaining vestige of a realist art.

The exhibition in 1909 at which these radical paintings were shown was both a critical triumph and a commercial success. But he did not have long to enjoy the acclaim. By the time of the 1915 film, despite appearances, Monet had suffered a series of setbacks that might have finished a lesser man. Four years earlier Alice had died and for many months the garden, for so long his laboratory of planting and painting, became a place of refuge and recovery from grief. But no sooner had he taken up his brushes again the following year than he began to notice milky shadows in front of his eyes. These were diagnosed as cataracts that would need a risky operation to correct – one he would continue to resist for another decade.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, in early 1914, Monet having reconciled himself to the coming decline in his sight, his eldest son, Jean, suddenly died. Then, just months later, France was plunged into war.

The 1915 film is silent, but any sound it might have had could well have included the boom of French howitzers positioned a few dozen miles from Giverny. And any camera set up with a view of the road that bisected the two gardens might well have captured the stretcher-bearers and walking wounded that trudged this way towards the military hospital in the village nearby. Given so much suffering, it is perhaps not surprising that the easel paintings of his lily pond from the war years are dark and uncertain, more frenetic in technique, more fragmentary in the views they seek to frame. But if mere glimpses of beauty were a realistic ambition to have in the midst of war, in such fragments Monet found a consoling vision that, a century later, is still as moving as it was then.

At the same time as these smaller paintings, Monet was starting work on the most ambitious of all his schemes, a huge series of panels for a circular room that would offer ‘the illusion of an endless whole’. By the time of his death he had completed more than 40 such paintings, among the finest of which are three comprising the Agapanthus triptych, assembled for the first time in the UK at the RA exhibition. Of the remaining panels, 22 would eventually be incorporated in the scheme known as the Grandes Décora­tions at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the work in which his two passions, gardening and art, seem finally united in a great dream garden of the mind.

For most artists, this would be a crowning achievement to a life’s work. But at the end of his life Monet insisted his true masterpiece was the garden itself. Garden enthusiasts may agree, but of more importance to art lovers, the ever-deepening insight he gained from his garden transformed what he thought his art should do, resulting in some of the finest nature paintings ever made, sublime and dreamlike images of a floating world. 

Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse is at the Royal Academy, London W1, from January 30 to April 20. To order your copy of Claude Monet: Water Lilies and the Garden of Giverny by Julian Beecroft (Flame Tree Publishing, £20) for £16.99 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844-871 1514 or visit Telegraph Bookshop