Claude Monet | The Path through the Irises, 1914-1917

Irises, among Monet's favorite flowers, lined the pathways leading up to the house and Japanese bridge on the artist's property at Giverny.

This bird's-eye view of a garden path belongs to a series of monumental works painted during the First World War that capture the vital essence of these flowers with intensity and breadth of vision.

Late in life, as his eyesight faltered, he dispensed with subtlety and "took in the motif in large masses", waiting "until the idea took shape, until the arrangement and composition inscribed themselves on the brain". | Source: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Claude Monet | The Path through the Irises, 1914-1917 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Claude Monet | Yellow Irises, 1924-1925 | Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Claude Monet | Iris, 1914-1917

The splendid irises that bloomed in May and June at Giverny were among Monet's favorites.

Thousands of bearded irises in blue and lavender spanned the boarder of his flower garden along the Grand Allée leading towards his house, and it is from this spectacular site that Monet was inspired to paint the present canvas.

Although these flowers, named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow, bloomed in a variety of colors, Giverny gardener and historian Elizabeth Murray tells us that blue was Monet's favorite floral color.

In the present composition, thick dollups of purple-blue pigment project from the more saturated areas of the canvas, and the richly colored petals of the flowers punctuate the hazy colorfield of foliage green.

The present canvas dates from circa 1914-17, and was painted in the midst of the First World War.

Monet was close to the nation's turmoil during this period, with his son on the battlefront and evidence of the wounded in nearby villages.

These hyper-saturated, abstracted compositions appear to be a meditative attempt at drowning out the surrounding din.

What better way to honor the sanctity of life than to immerse yourself in it, and Monet's painting here was a direct response to that very human need to reconcile the coexistance of beauty and destruction.

The present work was one of two major canvases by Monet exhibited at the New York Botanical Gardens earlier this year in conjunction with a major floral recreation of Monet's garden at Giverny.

This picture was selected by Paul Hayes Tucker to exemplify Monet's late career. | Source: © Sotheby's

Claude Monet | Irises by the Pond, 1914-1917 | Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Claude Monet | Iris mauves, 1914-1917 | Christie's

"Irises by the Pond", one of twenty views that Monet painted of irises on the banks of the lily pond, dates to his first concerted campaign of work on the Grandes décorations in 1914-1917.

It boasts the same monumental scale and free, daring handling as the final murals and may well have been conceived as part of the decorative ensemble, which underwent repeated revisions during the decade that Monet worked on it.

Claude Monet | Iris mauves, 1914-1917 | Christie's