The Water Lilies: The Two Willows
In the winter of 1920 the largest room at Giverny was not built for living in. It was a shed with a glass roof and a hard floor, put up for one job only, and on cold mornings the air inside held turpentine, damp plaster and the wet-earth smell of the garden coming in under the door. A man in his eighties worked there in a heavy coat. The canvases stood on low wheeled trestles so they could be pushed about like furniture. Most were taller than he was. Some were wider than a farm cart.
On one of them lay a stretch of water with two willow trunks rising out of it, one near the left edge and one near the right, like the posts of a doorway that has lost its door. Between them there is nothing but water: lily pads, the reflected undersides of leaves, cloud, and a light that refuses to settle.
He had painted willows in that garden for a quarter of a century. He had planted some of them. This time he was not painting a tree. He was building a room out of paint, and the trees were its walls.
The room he was making for people he would never meet
The scheme that became the large decorations started to take shape around 1914 and then swallowed the rest of his life. The idea was not a picture to hang neatly between two windows. It was a continuous surface, a band of water running past a viewer without a break, so that anyone standing inside it would lose the ordinary sense of where the wall stopped and the world started.
He gave the whole cycle to the French state. He did not live to see it installed. The panels went into two oval rooms at the Orangerie in 1927, the year after his death, and those ovals were designed so the paintings curve past the corner of your eye on both sides at once. Every decision in this canvas assumes that arrangement. It was made for a wall that bends.
By 1920 he had buried a great deal. His second wife, Alice, died in 1911. His son Jean died in 1914, just as the work on the decorations was gathering weight. Around 1912 he was told he had cataracts; which is to say that a man who had spent fifty years arguing about the exact temperature of a shadow was informed that the lens of his own eye had begun to yellow and cloud. He carried on for eleven more years before agreeing to an operation in 1923.
That is the pressure behind this panel. It was made by someone losing the one faculty his life had been built on, and his answer was to paint something bigger than any room he owned.
Two trunks and nothing else to hold on to
What separates this canvas from the others in the cycle is that it gives you something upright to stand next to.
Most of the large panels remove every landmark. No shore, no sky, no horizon; just water seen from above, which is a beautiful and slightly frightening thing to be handed at that scale. Here he does something different. He lets two willow trunks come down through the picture, one on each side, and they run from the top edge almost to the bottom. They are not detailed. They are dark, narrow, slightly ragged verticals, more like two long brushstrokes that were allowed to stay than like botany.
Their job is architectural. They cut the water into three: a narrow band at the left, a wide open middle, a narrow band at the right. Your eye enters through a gap and comes to rest in the centre. It is the oldest compositional trick there is, a frame within a frame, and he uses it here at a scale where the frame is roughly the height of a person.
Which means that when you stand close, the trunks are on either side of you. You are not looking at a doorway. You are standing in it.
How to paint something wider than your reach
Consider the physical problem. A canvas several metres across cannot be seen whole from close up, and it cannot be painted at all from far away. He had to work at arm’s length on a passage he could not judge, then walk backwards to find out whether it was right, then walk in again. Old men do not enjoy this. The wheeled trestles existed so the canvas could come to him rather than the other way around.
The paint tells you how it went. In the open middle the surface is layered and worked over; you can find strokes of blue-violet that were laid down early and are still visible under later greens, like an argument that never got fully settled. Around the trunks the handling tightens and darkens. At the top and bottom edges it loosens again, and in places the weave of the canvas shows through a thin wash where he decided that less was enough.
He was also painting from a pond that was itself made, not found. Giverny was rented in 1883 and bought in 1890. The water garden was dug from 1893 onward, which meant diverting a branch of the river Epte and obtaining permission from local authorities after farmers objected to what he intended to do with the water. The Japanese footbridge went up in 1895. Every willow, every lily, every reflection in this vast painting stands on top of a small administrative fight about a stream.
Learning to see it: read the verticals, then let them go
Give it two minutes and it changes character. Here is a way in.
- Start with the trunks. Follow one from top to bottom. Notice that it does not sit on anything. There is no bank, no root, no ground. It simply enters the water and stops. He has removed the evidence that would tell you where you are standing.
- Then look at what the trunks are made of. Not brown. Look for plum, slate, dark green, a bruised red. Read them side by side and they separate into several colours pretending to be one.
- Now the middle. Find the lily pads and note that they lie flat, in horizontal clusters, and that they are the only things in the picture obeying gravity. Everything else is reflection, and reflection has no weight.
- Last, defocus. Let your eyes go soft, as if you were looking at nothing. The picture resolves into a surface of light with two dark stitches holding it to the wall. That is the effect he was after.
The pleasure of this particular panel is the tension between those two readings. Sharp focus gives you trees. Soft focus gives you weather. It flips between them all day, depending on where you are standing and what the light is doing.
How it behaves in a real room
This is the panel for a wall you walk along rather than a wall you sit facing. Its shape is emphatically horizontal, and the two verticals give it a rhythm that suits a hallway, a landing, a long living room, the wall behind a dining table, the stretch of plaster above a low sideboard.
It is a quiet worker. The palette is green, blue-green and violet with very little pure warmth, so it cools a room and makes it feel deeper than it is; the same effect a window onto a garden has. Against white or off-white it reads calm and slightly formal. Against a warm grey or a soft clay wall the greens gain body and the trunks stop looking like ink lines and start looking like trees.
Hang it low. This is the one mistake people make with landscape formats of this kind. The picture was made for a viewer standing inside its horizon, so the centre line wants to be near eye level, not floating above the picture rail. Give it room to breathe on both sides too; the trunks need empty wall next to them to keep doing their job as a doorway.
And light it from the front rather than from above if you can. Raking light picks out the ridges of paint and turns the whole thing into texture. Even frontal light lets the colour do what it was built to do, which is to sit there for years and never look quite the same twice.
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Verify the original in the Musée de l'Orangerie collection record and continue through related works in the catalogue.