averilburystedmunds: La Fleur de la Jeunesse

My mind is full of artistic images and floral language as I read, ‘Monet: The Restless Vision’ and of the long, long years, though mainly in his extended old age, during which he gradually established his beloved Giverney with its expanding multi-floral, multi-layered gardens and waterways. Alongside this garden of delights, grew his immensely ambitious and ambitiously immense Grandes Decorations, his huge collection of outsize canvases portraying the movement and fluid shades and hues of the water and plants around him. “The ephemeral drifting lilies and dark downward coursing images of willows" flowed over hundred of canvases as he painted furiously, almost as though directed by an inner

Claude Monet in one of his studios, in front of
part of his magnificent collection of Les
Grandes Decorations.

command. He began these late majestic works in 1912 and continued throughout WW1 and afterwards; in spite of sons fighting in Verdun; his enduring friendship with Clemenceau, an important French leader during the war, journalist, politician and eventually Prime Minister of France; and the relatively close proximity of war to Giverney, Monet from his mid-seventies cultivated this extended, all-surrounding canvas garden as if possessed, his efforts belying his age and increasing frailty. These monumental paintings were intended to form one connected artistic theme; he had stumbled on the idea of an extended range of canvases on the one subject painted in different moods and lights and weather, and had used the notion again and again to great effect. His series on Haystacks, Cathedrals, Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Poplar Trees were immensely admired and influential.

It is in reading Jackie Wullschlager’s wonderfully-researched and written hommage to Monet that I have been prompted to wander back into the thicket off my own life, partly instigated by my noticing again the three photographic portraits of my sisters and me taken, I think, in 1955. Suddenly I can see, and wish I could paint, the memory of those girlish birthday parties in July, in perpetual sun in memory, when perhaps a score of happy, chattering little girls sat around the long borrowed table on the small front lawn, to eat paste sandwiches and delve into squat tumblers full of striped jelly, fruit and custard. Over the years, we grew from these noisy party children to the photo stage of our lives, to “jeunes filles dans la fleur de la jeunesse, apparitions delicieuses et passageres.” [p187] A passage of time, too full and busy for us to notice our slow maturing at the time. Or perhaps, we merely took it all for granted. Living, day to day, was the thing!

*-The three photographs, were taken at 21, 19 and 15 by a local photographer who offered to take them for free; an offer not to be missed by a poor working class family! He needed photographic portraits to enter some competition which interested him and, as he lived near us, had thought that we would make suitable models. Looking at them now, seventy years later, I see the smooth beauty of the faces, the youthful trust and innocence personifying the transience of youth. Qualities I never ever consciously noted in the past; they were simply ‘our photos’ on the wall, chiefly unnoticed and unappreciated. Now I see that they are a metaphor for Life! I know of the maturing, the changes, the stages, the gains and the losses, the history of our lives, with much unnoticed or remarked upon. And now that both my sisters have gone, towards the end of my life, looking back is pleasurable, often painless; sometimes a little painful, while offering insight and a closer observation of formerly elusive moments; memories of dreams and dramas re-surface and add to the richness of life now.