For Proust, Monet’s Lilies Symbolized the Transformation of Life into Art...But Not Life of Frog on a Lily Pad!

Jackie Wullschläger, "Monet: THE RESTLESS VISION", 2024:

"...Thirty years later, in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust alludes to Monet’s water lilies. On a walk, the narrator watches the river Vivonne ‘choked with water-plants’, ugly and disordered, ‘suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia … and … those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante’. Then comes a property whose owner ‘made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies’. In the depths, the narrator now sees ‘a clear, crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a strawberry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges.’  The gardener/artist has spun beauty and meaning from the chaos of nature and the mind. For Proust, Monet’s lilies symbolized the transformation of life into art.

The painter Elstir in À la recherche du temps perdu is partly based on Monet. In one of his seascapes, Proust writes, the artist ‘had felt so intensely the enchantment that he had succeeded in transcribing, in fixing for all time upon his canvas, the imperceptible ebb of the tide, the throb of one happy moment’.16  It is a description of the new painting which Monet inaugurated – painting which is expansive, fluid, and never stales because it is fed by the flux of so rich an inner life..."

 Artist: Jared Nangle, The New Yorker, November 2024