Irises

Claude Monet

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Irises is one of approximately twenty large-scale paintings of irises from Monet's water garden at Giverny that he produced between roughly 1914 and 1917, during the First World War. Presented from an elevated, bird's-eye viewpoint as though looking down from the Japanese bridge, the composition fills the canvas with a winding garden path bordered by densely massed iris blooms rendered in bold purples, blues, and greens applied with loose, gestural brushwork over a luminous white ground. Monet was a leading figure of French Impressionism and, in this late period, devoted himself almost exclusively to the elaborately cultivated gardens of his Giverny estate, using his flowers as subjects for an ever-expanding serial investigation of light and color. The work exemplifies the near-abstract quality of his final years, in which discernible depth and horizon dissolve into an all-over field of vibrant, pulsating form.