Irises

Irises from 1920 at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the late Giverny garden paintings — the irises painted in the summer of Monet's late career when the garden was in full mature development and he was working simultaneously on the monumental Orangerie panels. The iris beds at Giverny were planted in long parallel rows that created the garden's most spectacular early-summer display, their purple and blue flowers and vertical sword-like foliage providing a subject of exceptional formal richness. Monet had been planting and cultivating Giverny with the deliberateness of an artist preparing his materials, and by the 1920s the garden was the specific visual world he knew better than any other landscape. The close-up garden views from this period — irises, roses, the wisteria-covered pergola, the weeping willows — have a confidence and freedom born of absolute familiarity. The Art Institute's iris canvas, made in the same years as the great Orangerie panels, demonstrates that Monet's intimate garden scale and his monumental decorative ambitions were concurrent and mutually sustaining rather than opposed.

The irises fill the canvas in a dense, vertical mass, the purple and blue flowers set against the green-yellow foliage in complementary contrast. Monet applies paint in rapid, gestural strokes that differentiate blade-like leaves from rounded petals without precise botanical description. The composition has no horizon or spatial anchoring, creating an immersive surface of colour and texture.