Jean Baptiste Camille Corot - The Ferryman, 1865. Oil on canvas
Claude Monet - The Path through the Irises, detail (1824)
Most of the motifs for the two hundred canvases on which Monet worked after his 1908 trip to Venice were take from the gardens on his property at Giverny. His views of the water-lily pond are perhaps the most famous, but he also extracted novel compositions from other corners of the grounds. Like the paintings he made of water lilies, his views of irises were meant to rise from the particular to the universal. In this work, the most highly finished of the series, the flowers are offered not as botanical specimens but as archetypes. Monet was already experiencing great difficulties with his eyesight, but any grower of irises will recognize that he knowingly found the reddish purple tint that hides within every blue iris.
