Monet’s Nymphéas, Musée de l’Orangerie.

When we visited the Orangerie last year it was a rainy Sunday. When we visited it this year it was a rainy Sunday. Not planned that way, it’s just what happened.

If you are at the Orangerie it’s most likely that your goal is Monet’s huge Nymphéas (Water Lilies) paintings. You’ve seen the little ones, they’re in lots of museums and sometimes come out to Australia in touring exhibitions. But these are the granddaddies, two metres high and up to seventeen metres long. Monet painted these as a gift to the French state, who specially built two galleries to display them.

The rooms are oval, with seats in the middle, and if you go first thing on a Sunday morning (which we always seem to do) there aren’t many people around to make noise and interrupt your view. You sit in the middle of the room, look at one of these pictures and let it do its magic. The pictures are large enough for you to mentally block all the incidentals of the physical environment. It’s just you, looking at a lake below. Don’t look at the details, just absorb the whole picture, feeling it, not thinking about it, not analysing. You experience these pictures, you don’t ‘appreciate’ them. I was tired enough to almost go into a trance looking at them, to feel like I was being drawn into them and I could and would have stayed there for literally hours.

You almost see the water and the reflections moving. This is your mind doing what it thinks works, but a sense of dynamism also comes from the composition. There are two main elements to the paintings, the water lilies and the reflections, and it is the relationships between these that give the paintings their energy and movement. Usually the two complement each other, but sometimes the lilies surprise you by appearing in the midst of the reflections. The trees put more air and space into the pictures, adding a depth that lets you place yourself in relation to the view.

Try to work out the time of day from the shadows on the water and the light on the clouds. Is a breeze rippling the surface? Is that rain chopping up the reflections? The willow fronds are waving, and the lily pads move gently back and forth at their moorings.

PS No pictures for this entry. The Orangerie has banned photos since our last visit. But better than any photo I can take is the museum’s website. It allows you to make a ‘virtual visit’ to the rooms and to enlarge and examine the paintings. The text is in French, but that doesn’t matter because the paintings aren’t.

http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/homes/home_id24799_u1l2.htm