Musée de l’Orangerie – Monet’s Nymphéas
Today we are talking about the Musée de l’Orangerie (National Orangery Museum), one of the most famous museums in Paris, located in the heart of the city, within the Tuileries Gardens. Inaugurated in 1927, this museum is housed in a former orangery, known as the orangery. It is world famous for being the home of Claude Monet’s cycle of paintings depicting the famous Nymphéas.
Monet’s Nymphéas are a cycle of paintings donated to France by the painter Claude Monet in the aftermath of the armistice of 11 November 1918 as a symbol of peace, and exhibited in the rooms of the Orangerie in 1927. A few months after the artist’s death, as he had intended.
The word nymphéa derives from the Greek “numphé”. It is the scientific term for the water flower “water lily”, with which the famous Giverny pond was filled. And which inspired Monet in his titanic oeuvre of almost 300 paintings, including more than forty panels and three large-format tapestries.
This exceptional masterpiece offers a testimony to the work of the late Monet. It is one of the largest monumental achievements in painting of the first half of the 20th century. Almost one hundred linear metres of painted surface, in which a landscape of water bordered by water lilies, willow branches, reflections of trees and clouds unfolds, surrounds and engulfs the viewer, giving “the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore”, in Monet’s own words. A unique masterpiece, of which there is no equivalent in the world, an authentic ‘Sistine Chapel of Impressionism’.
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