Claude Monet's 1900 oil painting reproduction. Monet had a flower garden he planted dense beds of salmon pink and garnet nasturtiums as well as fuchsia and dahlias that bloomed through the summer. Monet's wife Alice protested as he eliminated trees, but Monet insisted they were blocking the light for his flowers. Monet felt more liberated to experiment with technique to use larger canvases and rely less on constantly checking a motif because, in his garden, he could control nature. Here, a motif was not the result of an accident but, rather, the result of deliberate organization: Monet designed the flower beds and coordinated the colors. When a white lily petal was soiled by soot, it was wiped clean. The garden was planted in light of paintings not yet painted, and paintings took on a kind of audacity in light of the fact that they were responding to a garden that had already been organized. So you get this kind of reciprocal relationship between gardening and painting. Monet ranged more widely with his technical experimentation than when he was facing the chaos of what we may call raw nature. In this way, the garden was more than a subject, but it was a site for a specific way of seeing and, finally, a specific way of painting.
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