6/6/2019 Hidden Water Lily Found Beneath Monet Painting | Smart News | Smithsonian

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Hidden Water Lily Found Beneath Monet

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Since 1961, a painting of wisteria by French impressionist Claude
Monet has hung in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, harboring a
secret beneath its swirling brushstrokes. As Nina Siegal reports for the
The New York Times, a conservator at the museum recently discovered
that this artwork had been painted over one of Monet’s iconic
depictions of water lilies—the garden subject that he painted
obsessively during the last two decades of his career.

No one had taken a close look at Wisteria since it came to the museum
nearly 60 years ago, but it was recently taken o of public view in
preparation for an upcoming exhibition on Monet’s garden paintings.
When modern art conservator Ruth Hoppe examined the artwork, she
noticed that it had been retouched to cover up tiny holes containing bits
of broken glass, the damage possibly caused by an Allied bomb that
shattered the glass of Monet’s studio during WWII. Hoppe decided to

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6/6/2019 Hidden Water Lily Found Beneath Monet Painting | Smart News | Smithsonian

X-ray the painting to get a better look, but found something entirely
unexpected: water lilies hiding beneath the artist’s depiction of
dangling wisteria.

“For us it was a big surprise,” Frouke van Dijke, a curator of 19th-

century art at the Gemeentemuseum, tells Siegal.

The painting was part of a larger installation that Monet called his
“Grandes Décorations”—a series of panels, stretching some 6-and-a-
half feet long by 20 feet wide and painted with water lilies. Monet also
created a series of wisteria paintings to be hung like a crown over the
water lilies.

“These works … took the artist to pictorial territory he had not visited
in more than 50 years of painting,” according to the Museum of
Modern Art. “The compositions zero in on the water’s surface so that
conventional clues to the artist’s—and the viewer’s—vantage points
are eliminated. The shimmer of light on the water and the
intermingling of re ections of the clouds and foliage overhead further
blur the distinctions between here and there.”

After the First World War drew to a close, Monet donated a number of
his “Grandes Décorations” artworks to the French state, which in turn
opted to display them in the Orangerie, an exhibition space in the
Tuileries gardens. But the show, which opened to the public one year
after Monet’s death in 1926, was not a success. Impressionism was
falling out of fashion, and viewers found Monet’s compositions
strange, even messy; some speculated that his failing eyesight was to
blame. And there was no room in the Orangerie to hang the wisteria
paintings that Monet had envisioned as
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6/6/2019 Hidden Water Lily Found Beneath Monet Painting | Smart News | Smithsonian

remained in his studio, along with other late paintings that were
neglected and largely forgotten until Monet was “rediscovered” in the
1950s. Eight of the wisteria works are known to exist today.

It is curious that the artist decided to paint the Gemeentemuseum’s

wisteria piece over another artwork. He was, by this point, a wealthy
man and did not need to resort to reusing canvases. Perhaps, Hoppe
speculates in an interview with Siegal, Monet was experimenting with a
transition to a new oral subject.

“The most logical reason for me was that he wanted to try something
new, and he wasn’t sure yet where it would end,” she explains. “To my
eye, this is a bridge between the water lilies and the wisteria.”

Monet’s water lilies have enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity, but

his wisteria works remain underappreciated. “[A]ll the focus is always
on the water lilies,” van Dijke tells Siegal, “so no one really cares about
the wisteria.” But the Gemeentemuseum’s Wisteria will be a
centerpiece of its new exhibition—boosted, perhaps, by a little water
lily star power.

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