Remembering Claude Monet, a Century Later

Isabelle Dupuy walked the Grande Allée in late spring, when the iron arches disappear under climbing roses in white, coral and deep pink. At the far end sits the house Monet lived in for 43 years: soft pink walls, green shutters, green stairs.

She photographed the beds up close, the violet globes of allium, the papery red poppies, then rebuilt the view in her studio. In her painting the arches become a canopy of sculpted petals that rise off the canvas, and the gravel path is laid in thick ochre strokes you could almost walk on.

Each flower is a single stroke of the palette knife, set down and left alone, the way the Impressionists trusted a quick touch of pure color to read as a blossom from across the room.

Across the road from the house lies the garden Monet dug himself: a pond fed by the river Epte, crossed by the green footbridge he painted again and again. Isabelle Dupuy stood at the rail where he stood, wisteria twisting overhead and the willows trailing into still water.

Three paintings grew from that afternoon. Monet himself leans on the bridge above glowing lilies. A couple pauses beneath cascades of violet wisteria. A weeping willow and a tree in full pink bloom frame a bridge draped in lavender, reflected in the pond below.

The water is built from horizontal dashes of cobalt, turquoise and white, so the surface seems to ripple as you move. The lilies sit up in thick, round dabs of red and gold, catching real light and shadow.

Dupuy’s path to Giverny began at the École des Beaux-Arts in Valence, France. There she studied the Impressionists closely: how Monet broke color into separate strokes, how he painted outdoors to catch light as it changed, how a canvas could hold a feeling rather than a record.

Visiting his home made those lessons personal. In the studio-salon, walls hung floor to ceiling with his canvases, and in the kitchen glazed in blue Rouen tiles, she saw how completely Monet lived inside color.

Her irises honor that inheritance. Violet blooms with flame-orange hearts rise from tall green blades, white and red water lilies float below, and a white trellis opens to the sky, painted thick enough to cast its own shadow.

Monet spent nearly thirty years painting the pond he built at Giverny, chasing the way light, sky and blossoms dissolve together on its surface. Standing at its edge, Isabelle Dupuy saw the same water that filled his canvases, and wanted to take it one step further: off the wall and toward the viewer.

In her lilies the water swirls in sweeping strokes of cobalt, ultramarine and turquoise, or falls in soft vertical dashes of lavender and sky blue. Willow branches trail down in fine green threads. The blossoms, ruby red, rose pink and creamy white with glowing gold centers, rise from the surface like real petals.

Monet worked with oil paint of his time, which could only be piled so high. Dupuy uses modern heavy-body acrylics and gels that hold their shape and dry firm, so each flower can stand up in sculpted relief and catch light and shadow as you walk past.