Published on November 13, 2025 under the Post category.
On the ground floor of the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris – a long building by the river banks of the Seine, and at the start of the Jardin des Tuileries – there is an exhibit of eight Monet paintings. The museum website introduces the paintings like so:
Offered to the French State by the painter Claude Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death.
The exhibit spans two rooms: each an oval. The two ovals connect together in a figure-of-eight. The walls of the room…
Published on November 13, 2025 under the Post category.
On the ground floor of the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris – a long building by the river banks of the Seine, and at the start of the Jardin des Tuileries – there is an exhibit of eight Monet paintings. The museum website introduces the paintings like so:
Offered to the French State by the painter Claude Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death.
The exhibit spans two rooms: each an oval. The two ovals connect together in a figure-of-eight. The walls of the rooms are white, each adorned with a wide-canvas Monet painting. When you are in either of the oval rooms, you are surrounded by colour: reds and yellows and blues and purples. You get a feeling that there is more detail than you can possibly comprehend, but you do your best to take in the works. From up close and afar, you study, appreciating the colours, the gradients, the trees, the reflections.
The painting on the left as you enter shows a gradient as if the sun is rising or setting – you don’t yet have a perfect grasp of how to distinguish between the two moments of day in art, and so you see both: a beginning and an end. You proceed further and see blue skies and white clouds reflected on the pond – blue a theme of several of paintings, you will later realise. What does it mean to appreciate a work?, you consider. Do I need to understand every detail? The answer to this question reveals itself as a smile adorns your face for reasons that you cannot quite put into words. Maybe the colour is brightening your mood. Or maybe the realisation that the more you look, the more you see satisfies a certain part of your mind that loves details.
At one point, after spending some time looking at a painting, you realise that there is a colour you didn’t notice before. You realise that there is an infinite amount to appreciate, and that you don’t feel an obligation to understand everything for the colours and the vastness of the paintings and the context in which they were offered – as a symbol for piece – take your breath away. You don’t need to understand all the details of the works for them to have an impact, to leave you with some feeling. I left with a sense of wonder.