Peony Garden

Peony Garden from 1887 at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo belongs to Monet's Giverny garden subjects from the period before the water garden had taken its famous form but when the flower garden was already his primary painterly environment. Peonies were among the flowers he cultivated specifically for their visual properties — the large, complex blooms offered a different chromatic and textural challenge from irises or chrysanthemums — and their brief season in early summer gave them the evanescent quality he sought in all his garden subjects. Japan's National Museum of Western Art was established specifically to house the Matsukata Collection, which had been assembled in Paris and included major works from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist periods; the collection's complex repatriation history, involving wartime confiscation and postwar negotiation between France and Japan, makes the NMWA's holdings a unique document of the internationalization of Western art. That this Monet peony garden canvas ended up in Tokyo has its own poetic resonance given Monet's lifelong engagement with Japanese culture and the two hundred Japanese prints that hung in his Giverny house.

Monet's brushwork is fluid and instinctive, breaking surfaces into interlocking dabs and strokes of pure color that blend optically at viewing distance. His palette captures the chromatic complexity of natural light — lavenders in shadow.