Wisteria

Since the 1890s, when Claude Monet first began to cultivate the garden at his house in Giverny, the artist considered painting a suite of murals celebrating the lily pond there. The project did not take shape until years later, in 1914, when the statesman Georges Clemenceau encouraged Monet to undertake it. The small Japanese footbridge that was part of his garden, covered with a metal trellis with wisteria flowers that vertically expanded the floral display, provided the inspiration for a series of works depicting wisteria. Monet initially envisaged a frieze of such paintings above the large canvases of water lilies, and the present work is one of the surviving paintings from this aspect of the project, which was never fully realized.

In the Oberlin painting, the tangle of colored lines and the variegated blues of the sky give a tremendous sense of movement to the work. The closely cropped viewpoint, the thick brushstrokes, and the palpable energy of the painting show it to be a forerunner of later twentieth-century abstraction.

At first, the French government considered installing Monet's works in the Hôtel de Biron (now the Musée Rodin), but eventually the renovated Musée de l'Orangerie in the Tuileries was chosen, where the water-lily paintings were installed in 1927, and whose dimensions were not large enough to accommodate the wisteria paintings. The present work remained in Monet's studio after his death.