Thursday, May 01, 2003

Weekly Art History Lesson: Claude Monet (1840-1926) saw the world as a fantastic mixture of color and light. How much of that world view was due to genius and how much to faulty eyesight, we’ll never know, but legend has it that when once fitted with eye-glasses to correct astigmatism, he threw them away, saying, “If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”

What better subject for an artist of color and light than a field of tulips?



Tulip Fields in Holland,1886

Painted in the late 1880’s, when success finally left him well-off enough for a series of travels, the painting is a landscape unique to Holland - the quintessential Dutch windmill surrounded by a sea of tulips. It is a blurred panorama of light and color that leaves one wishing the focus could be adjusted ever so slightly.

How a flower from the high, rocky mountains of Pakistan ever came to be the agricultural mainstay of a marshy, low-lying northern European country is a story in itself. It is, in many ways, the story of beauty made possible by science and technology. It was the engineering feat of the windmill which made the marshy fields dry enough for successful bulb cultivation by pumping the excess water into canals that drain to the sea. And it was the science of pharmacology that brought the flower to the marshes.

It was a French pharmacologist, (back when pharmacologists were botanists, not chemists), who introduced the tulip to Holland. Charles De L'ecluse (aka Carolus Clusius), was forced to flee in succession not only his native France, but academic posts in Prague and Vienna because of his Protestant beliefs. He accepted the post of head botanist at the University of Leiden in 1593 with the intent of establishing a medicinal garden such as those in Vienna and Prague which had established his reputation. Among his collection of plants was the tulip, given to him by the Viennese ambassador to the Turkish court of Suleiman the Magnificent.

The tulip became one of the most popular flowers in the Leiden garden, although it had no medicinal value. Clusius was loathe to share his specimens, but contraband bulbs lifted surreptitiously from his garden made their way to private hands. Eventually, with time and hybridization, they gave birth to the brightly colored fields of modern Holland - and the Holland of Monet.

Monet, on seeing those fields, described them as “enough to drive a poor painter crazy - impossible to render with our poor colors,” but render them he did in his astigmatic but beautiful way.

Unfortunately for Monet, his vision continued to fail as he got older. Astigmatism gave way to cataracts, which not only robbed him of clarity, but of color perception. By the end of his life, he was quite blind; his view of the world unquestionably altered, but no less beautiful.

 

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