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The restoration of Claude Monet’s Waterlilies wasn’t met with hushed reverence, but with an audible thrill. The Portland Art Museum buzzed with exclamations of color, texture, and light. Standing back, I searched for the enveloppe, a term I’d read on an interpretive label moments before. Monet used it to describe a hazy, intangible “ether,” the atmosphere between the eye and the landscape. The artist, who spent his life trying to capture light’s impermanence, wouldn’t have approved of Waterlilies’ varnish. Now, after careful restoration, the oil painting’s enveloppe has been revived.
Monet painted Waterlilies around 1915. It was a difficult time for the artist—his son and second wife had recently died, World War I raged, and his eyesight was fading. The constructed water lily pond on Monet’s Giverny property was an object of his fascination, and he painted it en plein air over 250 times across four decades. The composition owned by PAM feels especially evocative.
Although Waterlilies is the centerpiece, Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny: Portland’s Waterlilies Resurfaces doesn’t just celebrate Monet’s mastery. It examines an interesting influence on his work, one that shaped the entire Impressionist movement: Japanese woodblock prints.
Monet never traveled to Japan, but he loved the Japanese masters. He was inspired by woodblock prints called ukiyo-e—you might have heard them described as “floating world” images. Monet’s obsession is unsurprising. The term ukiyo-e relates to the Buddhist word ukiyo, a portmanteau of the Japanese characters “uki” (sadness) and “yo” (life). Meditate on the transitory nature of life itself for a moment, and you’ll get the general idea. The concept falls in step with the Impressionist emphasis on ephemeral beauty in the everyday.
If you’re wondering how ukiyo-e prints left Japan, Western imperialism played a role. Japan’s isolationist policy under the Tokugawa shogunate ended in 1854 with the Convention of Kanagawa, which opened trade with the West. Ukiyo-e became so en vogue in the United States and Europe that it inspired its own term: Japonisme. Monet stocked his Giverny home with prints of landscapes, actors, and geishas, while other artists began emulating the style.
Among the French artists enamored by Japanese printmaking are some names you’re likely to know, like Mary Cassatt and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. (The latter even had a questionable habit of dressing up in a Japanese warrior costume.) The curators at PAM took this creative cross-pollination as their cue, crafting an exhibition that brings Monet’s world into sharper focus.
“You can’t do a Monet show without talking about the Japanese influence, and you can’t include the Japanese influence unless you talk about how it impacted the French graphic arts,” explained Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D., the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, at a curator’s talk.
Thus Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny unfolded, a collaborative effort between four dedicated staff members with high-flying titles: Chapin, chief conservator Charlotte Ameringer, Jeannie Kenmotsu, Ph.D., the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer curator of Asian art, and Lloyd DeWitt, Ph.D., the Richard and Janet Geary curator of European and American art pre-1930.
The exhibition opens in a golden-yellow gallery, where dreamy, naturalistic Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, and others recall the 261-print collection that once adorned Monet’s kitchen in Giverny. Moving deeper into the space, Japanese-influenced lithographs and aquatints by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cassatt, Henri Rivière, and Maurice Denis appear alongside contemporary photographs of Monet’s Giverny garden by Susan Seubert and Stu Levy. At the heart of the exhibition, Waterlilies, the restored pièce de résistance, glows in a blue-hued room.
But why restore Waterlilies now?
For starters, Monet never intended for the work to be varnished. In fact, he forbade it, despite the era’s prevailing attitude that an unvarnished painting was an unfinished one. A glossy varnish coating can help protect a painting, but “like a rock in water, all the values change,” DeWitt explained at the talk. The museum snagged Waterlilies for a bargain ($60,000 in 1959), and over the last 65 years, the synthetic varnish applied to the painting darkened. Blue hues, in particular, shift with increased saturation.
With Ameringer on staff, a conservator who could confidently remove the varnish without impacting the paint itself, the delicate monthslong project was finally achievable. Using a special solvent and handmade swab, she tackled the project in PAM’s new conservation studio, part of the museum’s 100,000-square-foot transformation-in-progress.
And now, free from the glaze that once obscured it, Monet’s Waterlilies pulses with light.
Sitting on a bench in front of the painting, I may as well be knee-deep in Monet’s pond. Without a horizon or shoreline, water dominates the plane. Warm blues and pinks swirl, while vertical suggestions of yellowy willow branches dip into the pool. Gestural strokes punctuate the tranquil scene with flickering dry-brushed circles, describing lily pads or capillary waves. The blossoms are straight-up theatrical: bright pink, violet, and red, rendered in thick impasto, creating whipped peaks of layered color.
“It’s just glowing! It’s just radiant! I’M AMAZED,” a nearby visitor mused.
Ameringer’s insistence that the painting be “daylit” was a smart one. The lighting decision approximates both what Monet would have experienced in his garden and the light at Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie, where eight other works from his Water Lilies—Nymphéas in French—cycle are displayed. This makes the painting appear to glow in the gallery.
At first I’m surprised by Waterlilies’ visible white margin, but it exemplifies Monet’s sketchlike approach. The artist used a larger-than-usual canvas (roughly 5 feet by 6 feet), freer brushwork, and an abstracted approach to prepare for a Grand Decoration of water lily paintings, which would later be gifted to France. The painting also brings the ukiyo-e style to mind, with its cropped composition and confident color choices.
It’s clear why Monet referred to the Water Lilies series as landscapes of water. I easily get lost in the fluid, dreamlike expanse. Yet for all its water, the restored composition feels airy, crisp, maybe even light-hearted. Waterlilies’ matte quality scatters textured light across a magical scene. Its spirit has been revived.
Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny: Portland’s Waterlilies Resurfaces is on display at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park, through Sun Aug 10, included with general admission, hours and more info at pam.org.
