Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (36 page)

How much political capital Clemenceau had lost was starkly revealed in January when his name was put forward to become president of the republic to replace Poincaré, whose seven-year term was coming to an end. Ironically, Clemenceau had little desire to occupy the office—which he had joked was as useless as the prostate gland—but allowed himself to be persuaded by friends as well as by Lloyd George.
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His rival was sixty-four-year-old Paul Deschanel, an old adversary against whom, in 1894, he had fought a duel with swords. Deschanel came off worse on that occasion, quitting the field of honor with his head swathed in bandages. More than two decades later he avenged his loss, polling 408 votes as opposed to 389 for Clemenceau. As a newspaper reported, Clemenceau was “opposed by the Socialists, who found him too conservative, and by a large number of Conservatives, who found him too progressive.”
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Clemenceau immediately withdrew his candidacy, and on the following day Deschanel was elected with 734 votes. Sensing he had lost the faith and support of the chamber, Clemenceau made his journey to the Élysée Palace, letter of resignation in hand. Two English visitors to Paris at this time were shocked by his treatment. “This time it’s the French who are burning Joan of Arc,” remarked Lloyd George, while the ambassador to Paris, Lord Derby, wrote to King George V: “I think the general feeling—and it is one I must say that one feels oneself—is that he has been treated with base ingratitude.”
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ONE OF CLEMENCEAU’S
first acts, two days after his resignation, was to visit Giverny for a consoling lunch. Clemenceau’s resignation did not bode well for the donation of the paintings, for which, more than a year on, nothing had yet been signed or made official. Equally inauspicious was the fact that Étienne Clémentel was no longer in government, having left the Ministry of Commerce and Industry at the end of 1919 to become the founding president of the International Chamber of Commerce. Monet had, however, managed to extract from him, before he left office, an ample supply of coal for the winter.
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In January, the Grande Décoration piqued the interest of an important collector. Jacques Zoubaloff was an industrialist from the Caucasus who, years before, had staked his small fortune—including his wife’s modest jewelry collection—on an oil well in Bibi-Eybat (in present-day Azerbaijan). Just at the point when he was on the verge of ruin and contemplating suicide, his well began to gush, making him “a millionaire a hundred times over.”
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Zoubaloff fetched up in Paris, and by the outbreak of the Grande Guerre he was the most insatiable and generous collector in France. By 1920 he had amassed an unparalleled collection of French painting and sculpture, including works by Monet, Degas, Matisse, and Derain. When not even his capacious mansion in the rue Émile-Ménier, in Passy, could contain his collection, he began showering his works on the Louvre, on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, on the Petit-Palais, as well as on provincial museums such as the one in Nantes. In the Louvre alone, his inexhaustible munificence filled two entire rooms with bronzes. Early in 1920 the newspapers reported that for “services to national museums,” Zoubaloff, “as discreet as he is generous,” had been promoted to Officer of the Legion of Honour.
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This fabulously wealthy philanthropist visited Giverny toward the end of January, agreeing to purchase one of Monet’s
Poplars
for 25,000 francs. Back in his stately mansion, Zoubaloff seems to have been overtaken by second thoughts. His lawyer wrote to Monet explaining that he wished to exchange the
Poplars
for a
Palace of Westminster
that he had seen during his visit. The lawyer reported that “
Poplars
is a wonderful canvas but does not harmonize very well with the two other masterpieces of yours that he owns already.” Zoubaloff therefore offered to bump up his payment to 35,000 or even 40,000 francs so long as he could acquire the Westminster painting. Somewhat perversely, Monet turned down the offer, apologizing to the lawyer, Adrien Hébrard, but explaining that he wished to keep the
Palace of Westminster
, which was not for sale at any price. But Hébrard had another request from Zoubaloff, casually expressed in a postscript: “What is the price of the
grandes décorations
that you are working on at the moment?”
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Once again Monet failed to oblige the collector. “As for the decorative panels that I am in the
process of painting,” he airily informed Hébrard, “it is impossible to fix a price before they are completed.”
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The timing of Zoubaloff’s inquiry might have been significant, coming so soon after the ousting of Clemenceau and the potential faltering of Monet’s donation to the state. It is tempting to see the hand of Clemenceau steering Zoubaloff toward Giverny and the Grande Décoration.
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A sale to Zoubaloff would have ensured that Monet received a handsome sum for his years of work on the Grande Décoration. Moreover, given Zoubaloff’s spectacular record as a benefactor, the panels would undoubtedly have found their way into a public collection in France. However, if such a plan had been hatched, Monet knew nothing about it. His abrupt dismissal of Zoubaloff’s query was curious in light of how the Russian was precisely the sort of generous and discriminating patron about whom he and his friends had once dreamed: someone who would keep a series of water lily paintings together in order to create a “flowery aquarium.”

In Monet’s reticence about the Grande Décoration—his insistence that it was not finished and his reluctance to part with any of the panels—lay the first disquieting hints of another crisis: what could be called the “unspeakable drama” of the water lilies.

IF MONET WAS
reluctant to offer the Grande Décoration for sale, he was only too happy to sell another work taking up a large amount of space. In February he learned that the Society of Friends of the Louvre, headed by Raymond Koechlin, was proposing to purchase
Women in the Garden
.
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This huge canvas, rejected by the jury for the 1867 Paris Salon, had been in Monet’s possession for more than fifty years, existing as a proud trophy of his embattled and at times impoverished youth. It was the angry exclamation mark to what he called his “younger years of struggle and hope.” To a visiting journalist he once pointed to the shadow across the path in the foreground, cast by a tree. “It’s impossible to imagine,” he said, “the howls of outrage caused by this blue shadow.”
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Monet was not being exactly truthful:
Women in the Garden
had never been exhibited in public and therefore, unlike Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
or
Olympia
, had never been exposed to the ridicule of the masses and the barbs of the critics. Even so, to have this symbol of his earlier rejection enter the Louvre would mark an important moment for Impressionism in general and Monet in particular: the consecration of a movement that had once been so savagely scorned. But the purchase probably had another, more practical element. Koechlin no doubt arranged it as a quid pro quo for Monet’s donation of his paintings, the original venue for which had of course been the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, another institution with which Koechlin was closely involved.

Monet’s four paintings of his pond may have been languishing in the salesroom in Paris, but throughout the spring of 1920 would-be buyers of his other canvases were beating a path to Giverny. In March he complained to Paul Durand-Ruel: “I have nothing to complain about except the incessant visits of buyers, who bother and often bore me.” He claimed that among them were some “men of taste,” although these were the only visitors, he claimed, who could not afford his works.
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This comment reveals Monet’s discourteous attitude toward some of his patrons. Always eager for money, he scrutinized his accounts with the Bernheim-Jeunes and Durand-Ruel with a rigorous precision that belied his failing eyesight. At the same time he was contemptuous of those who lavished huge sums of money on his paintings. When in the spring of 1920 his works once again achieved high prices at a sale in New York, he churlishly claimed that “this does nothing except prove the stupidity of the public.”
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Some of this contempt for well-heeled collectors may have been behind his refusal to sell one of his London paintings to Jacques Zoubaloff or to consider an offer from him for the Grande Décoration. If so, the disdain was unfair and badly misplaced, for Zoubaloff, as a journalist rightly noted, sought out his works with “zeal and passion” and selected them with impeccable taste.
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One of the would-be buyers visiting Giverny in the spring of 1920 was Marc Elder, a novelist who had won the Prix Goncourt in 1913 for
The People of the Sea
. A friend of Mirbeau, on whom he published a long essay in 1914, he came to Giverny in his capacity as president of the Society of Friends of the Museum of Nantes. This group of art lovers could not
help but notice that the “tumults of Impressionism” had left no trace in Nantes, and so they came together, wrote Elder, to procure “a collection of new painters”—including, they hoped, a Monet.
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The painter was happy to requite them by donating one of his water lily paintings.

A few weeks later Elder published a description of his visit
chez
Monet. He had arrived in Giverny on a lovely day, “gray but soft, exalted by the brightness of early spring.”
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Monet took him outside, where several gardeners—evidently new recruits—were toiling in the flower beds “under the eye of voracious finches” as the pear trees shook their snowy blossoms. Elder had grown up in Nantes, facing the Atlantic, and as the two men sat on a bench beside the water lily pond their conversation turned to the sea and, in particular, to seafood. “Forgive me, my dear master,” Elder later wrote in his account of the visit, “if I reveal that our words touched upon gluttony!” The two men discussed in lip-smacking detail “pike with white butter, grilled red mullet under vine leaves, and the fresh saltiness of Breton oysters in their grey shells.” When Monet expressed disappointment at a dish of lampreys he was once served, Elder replied: “You must come eat them with us!”

Monet’s robust appetite and pleasure in food were evidently as strong as ever. But he revealed to Elder the loss of one of his other pleasures. As they sat beside the pond, he lamented his hearing loss and of not being able to hear “the faint fluting of toads.” “O gourmand of nature,” wrote Elder, “there was such melancholy in your voice!”

THESE “INCESSANT VISITS”
of would-be buyers continued into the summer when, in early June, a small group of distinguished Americans came to Giverny. A map of the Monet paintings in the United States would have shown dense clusters in New York, Boston, and Connecticut; others were scattered as far afield as Denver and New Orleans. All offered testimony of the “rapacity of the Yankees” when it came to collecting Monet. But the densest agglomeration would have been in Chicago, where the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition had brought the Impressionists to the attention of well-heeled local collectors. Framed Monets could be found in elegant mansions all along Chicago’s Gold
Coast. The poppy fields of Giverny adorned the château-style mansion of Evaline Kimball, widow of the piano maker William W. Kimball, and snow-covered wheat stacks hung in the home of Annie Swan Coburn, widow of a prominent attorney. By far the greatest collection, however, had been on the red-velvet walls of the picture gallery in “The Castle,” Bertha Palmer’s turreted mansion on Lake Shore Drive. Over the years she had purchased ninety Monet paintings.
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When Bertha Palmer died on her Florida estate in 1918, one of her pallbearers was Martin A. Ryerson, another Gold Coast resident who owned more than forty Monet paintings. Ryerson was an American version of Jacques Zoubaloff: someone who happily combined enormous wealth with discerning tastes and an extraordinarily generous philanthropy. The son of a wealthy lumber baron from Michigan, he had studied in Paris and Geneva before going to Harvard Law School and then taking over the family business. He had been one of the founders and benefactors of the University of Chicago, serving as president of the board of trustees and funding both a physics laboratory and library. However, perhaps his most generous benefactions had been reserved for the Art Institute of Chicago, to which he began donating paintings in 1892, and for which, in 1900, he had endowed an art library. His philanthropy was guided in part by his friend, the wealthy financier Charles L. Hutchinson, founding president of the Art Institute and a relative of Ryerson’s wife, Caroline. The two men and their wives often toured Europe together in search of paintings and other objects for the museum. France was a particularly favored destination for Ryerson, who was fluent in French. Thanks to their efforts, the Art Institute became, in 1903, with the purchase for $2,900 of
Bad Weather, Pourville
, the first museum in the United States to acquire a Monet.

Many of Ryerson’s Monet paintings were already on loan to the Art Institute (and most would eventually be donated to the collection), while Bertha Palmer’s bequest to the museum included nine Monets. This generosity made Léonce Bénédite, director of the Luxembourg Museum, exult over the French treasures in American museums during a tour of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago in 1920. “Their museums!
Such wonderful collections!” he exclaimed in an interview with a French paper on his return, noting that Ryerson had donated two entire rooms of Impressionist paintings to the Art Institute. By 1920 these museums surpassed the Impressionist collection of the Luxembourg: it held a total of ten Monet paintings, plus a paltry two by Édouard Manet, three by Cézanne, five by Degas, seven by Pissarro, and eleven by Renoir. Bénédite was humbled by the “noble and generous friends of French culture” in the United States, a land where the people cherished France as “the great source of ideas, a civilizing agent.”
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