Space, Time, and Change in Claude Monet’s Late Paintings

This chapter demonstrates through close visual analysis that Monet’s late paintings differ significantly from the artist’s earlier creations, in spite of the fact that they do not form an all-encompassing break with the earlier work and in some cases revisit earlier motives, themes, and modes of painting such revisits include the representation of gardens and water reflections; the rendering of phenomena under varying light conditions; luminescence; and, most persistently: the representation by painterly means of flux. The chapter argues that the predominant theme of Monet’s late work is change and transition understood in the most radical sense. While change is also thematized in the earlier work and expressed in paintings like the cathedral and haystack series of the early 1890s, the form it takes in the late nymphéa paintings is decidedly distinct: change and transformation become absolute and pervade, besides subject matter, both the structure of the whole and modes of paint application. The chapter presents the differences between the earlier and later works primarily as an expression of Monet’s old age and as consequence of the artist’s constant and penetrating observation of his immediate surroundings in Giverny.