Waterlilies - Monet's ultimate masterpiece in the twilight of his life

"I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that's the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible." Claude Monet

Dr Abe V Rotor 
Acknowledgment: photos from the Internet, Wikipedia. 

Waterlilies - Claude Monet's Signature

Claude Monet (1840-1926); murals in a museum enshrine his fame.  

Monet painted his famous murals Waterlilies towards the end his long productive life as an impressionist. He worked with fading eyesight and in frail health. Few men have shown such an extraordinary feat.  Among them was the great modern painter Pablo Picasso. Ernest Hemingway's Nobel prize winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea, pictures such rare quality with sweet irony of anonymity.

What a genius to make a masterpiece with the last rays of the sun, 
drawing each like thread and weaving the aging colors of rainbow; 
while thousands at their bidding rise early to catch the rising sun,
aiming at fortune - and failing - search it at the end of the rainbow. ~

  

 
  

  

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.

 Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it. Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. November 1840, Paris, France