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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Monet's Water Lillies see light of day

30/07/2003Monet's Water Lillies see light of day

To the delight of art lovers the world over, a Paris museum is to shed new light on Claude Monet's masterpiece Water Lillies - dubbed the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. Claire Rosemberg reports.

It is one of the sadder chapters in art history.

Monet's masterpiece Water Lillies

For almost half a century, the last works of Impressionist master Claude Monet have been shown bereft of natural light in a cluttered, slightly down-at-heels Paris art-house.

But currently, Paris's Orangerie museum, home to Monet's monumental Water Lillies, is closed while undergoing a major face-lift aimed at restoring the mammoth tableaux to their former glory — by bringing them light.

Set in an obscure corner of the Tuileries gardens by the Seine, the museum is to reopen in late 2004 with a newly refurbished glass roof and galleries for the Water Lillies, as well as a freshly-dug underground exhibition space for its other prestigious collections.

Monet was over 80 and losing his sight when he put the finishing touches to the Water Lillies in the early 1920s, works inspired by his legendary water garden at Giverny, outside Paris.

Hailed by critics as the culmination of his life's work, or "the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism", due to the passion and power streaming from the works, Monet donated the Water Lillies to the French state to celebrate the victory of World War I.

Paris Orangerie is undergoing refurbishment

 The government in turn offered Monet a special museum to house them — the Orangerie — and an architect was brought in to remodel the 1852 building.

Originally a hothouse for potted baby orange trees, L'Orangerie was also used for dog-shows, art-shows and theatre, before being turned into a barracks for conscripts and a weapons depot during the war years.

Monet died in 1926 and the following year his eight giant panels, almost a decade in the making, were unveiled to the public displayed in two spacious oval galleries opening onto the gardens, with natural light pouring through the glass dome overhead.

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