Agapanthes

Agapanthes (Agapanthus) from around 1900 at the Musée Marmottan Monet shows Monet turning his attention to the blue African lily, a plant he cultivated in the Giverny garden for its specific chromatic qualities — the deep blue flowers providing one of the few pure blues available in the garden palette, the spherical flower heads creating a distinctive botanical form quite different from the irises, roses, and clematis that predominated. By 1900 his engagement with individual plants as specific subjects had been developing for more than a decade, and the agapanthus canvas belongs to the informal botanical series that paralleled his more public serial campaigns. The Marmottan holds this canvas within its comprehensive Monet collection, where it can be compared with the chrysanthemum, iris, and water lily subjects that track Monet's sustained engagement with flowering plants as pictorial subjects across his entire career. The Marmottan's position as the world's largest Monet repository gives it particular authority in presenting the full range of his work, including these lesser-known botanical subjects that demonstrate the depth of his garden engagement beyond the famous series paintings.

The agapanthus flower heads are rendered as clusters of blue and violet marks that hover between botanical description and pure color event. Monet's touch is loose and varied, with strokes of different sizes building up the blooms without defining individual florets — the whole suggesting the floral mass through chromatic rather than linear means.