Três vasos de tulipas (Trois pots de tulipes) - Claude Monet

Três vasos de tulipas (Trois pots de tulipes) - Claude Monet

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OST - 51x36 - 1885

Trois pots de tulipes is part of a group of at least 36 canvases that Monet executed in 1882-1885 for Paul Durand-Ruel. The Parisian dealer commissioned him this series in May 1882 to decorate the door panels in his apartment located 35 rue de Rome in Paris. The commission fell upon Monet at a key moment of his artistic career, in between his two 1882 Pourville excursions. The previous year, Durand-Ruel had collected a substantial cash advance from the Union Générale bank in Paris, which enabled him to resume buying from the Impressionists on a massive scale for the first time since 1873. Durand-Ruel's renewed support transformed Monet's finances. The first three years that the artist had spent at Vétheuil, from 1878 through 1880, had been marked by great financial hardship. In 1881, by contrast, his income from Durand-Ruel alone was nearly twenty thousand francs, roughly three times the yearly rent on his Vétheuil house. Durand-Ruel's regular payments, which continued through 1885, made possible Monet's extensive travels of this period, both on the Normandy Coast and the Mediterranean. This financial stability also enabled Monet to move first to Poissy in December 1881 and then to Giverny in April 1883, where he created his legendary water garden.

When the Philadelphia Museum of Art held an exhibition back in 2015, shedding light on the relationship between Paul Durand-Ruel and his artists, the exhibition catalogue provided the following description of this commission: ‘The set comprised 36 paintings on canvas, of which 30 would be mounted onto five double doors to decorate Paul Durand-Ruel's apartment. Each door followed the same pattern: the upper section was formed by two large vertical panels; two small horizontal panels lay in the center, and two almost square panels fitted at the bottom. Each panel was treated as an individual picture’.

As described by Paul Tucker in his biography of Monet, the commission was ‘one of the artist's major preoccupations between 1882 and 1885’ and the paintings were ‘charming, lusciously painted, and often quite novel’. This series included twenty-nine flower still-lives and seven images of fruit, and were hung in 1885 on the six double doors in Durand-Ruel's large drawing-room. Trois pots de tulipes, which depicts three terracotta pots – one with two red tulips, another with a white tulip and the third seems to be a yellow chrysanthemum or dahlia - was installed at the bottom left of Door D. Four additional still-lives were acquired by Durand-Ruel at the same time, but do not seem to have been used to decorate the doors. Together, the panels constitute Monet's most sustained investigation of the still-life genre in his entire career. John House has written, ‘his explorations of this subject include some of the most lavish still-lives produced by the Impressionist group, and some of the most radical challenges to a long-standing still-life tradition’.

Monet set to work on the panels for Durand-Ruel immediately upon receiving the commission in the spring of 1882, urged by his eager art patron in a letter dated 24 May 1882 who was already enquiring him on his progress, ‘have you painted the flowers as I asked you? Have you begun my canvases for the dining room in the rue de Rome?'. Two days later, Durand-Ruel wrote to him again, ‘I am still counting on you to paint my little door panels as soon as you can (…) You have magnificent flowers and trees before your eyes at this season of the year’. Yet the project proved slower and more difficult than he had foreseen, and he had completed only two small panels by December. The artist had worked extensively in still-life during his three years at Vétheuil, in part because his efforts in this genre, particularly the floral compositions, were readily salable and yielded higher prices in this period than his landscapes. However, the problem of thinking in terms of a large decorative ensemble was one that he had not previously faced, and Durand-Ruel's impatience for the panels placed an additional unfamiliar pressure on him. In the spring and summer of 1883, following his move to Giverny, Monet worked relentlessly on the project, pressurized by Durand-Ruel, who sent him vases for the still-life bouquets. In a letter to the critic Théodore Duret in September 1883, Monet explains that bad weather has interrupted his landscape painting and adds that he is using the rainy days to work on ‘a series of dining-room panels for Durand-Ruel’. His other main preoccupation during this period was to get the gardens at Giverny in order, providing him with blossoms for painting.

A substantial part of the decorative ensemble, including all of the large vertical panels for the upper part of the doors, was delivered by the end of 1883, before Monet departed for a three-month sojourn in Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. He resumed work on the commission for Durand-Ruel upon his return to Giverny in April 1884, and the entire ensemble was completed and installed by the end of the following year. Monet complained to Durand-Ruel of his relentless efforts invested in his commission in March 1885, writing ‘I've just spent a whole week on your panels. A week of maddening rage, restarting, scratching, puncturing my canvases’. The thirty-six panels remained in place in Durand-Ruel's dining room until 1922, when they were transferred to the apartment of the dealer's son Georges on rue Jouffroy in Paris.

That Monet selected floral motifs for the majority of the panels in the ensemble is not surprising. The artist's passion for flowers is legendary, and they constituted a major theme of his work from his earliest days to the end of his career. Indeed, he once said, ‘I perhaps owe it to flowers for having become a painter’, and on another occasion declared, ‘What I need most of all are flowers, always, always’. In the present canvas, Monet’s almost personifying representation of the red and white tulips – a flower he discovered more thoroughly during his Holland trip in April 1886 – make them look like elegant dancing female figures, performing for the towering yellow chrysanthemum. Their movements are constrained by the humble terracotta pots that lock them into the earth. This still-life’s dynamism strongly contrasts with the prosaic red and white tulip arrangement in a vase decorating the door panel to the left of Trois pots de tulipes on Door D. The slightly elevated three-quarter view angle that Monet used for Trois pots de tulipes conveys a sense of intimacy, closeness and even dialogue with the flowers, as opposed to the more frontal view used for Vase de Tulipes.

Following his completion of the Durand-Ruel panels in 1885, Monet's interest in still-life waned, though he continued to lavish attention on his gardens at Giverny and to draw wide-reaching inspiration from them for the remainder of his life. He was now spending more time in his studio retouching his outdoor paintings, and the rainy days that had previously suited flower painting instead became an opportune moment for the increasingly complex business of finishing his landscapes. Moreover, the Durand-Ruel door commission was effectively Monet’s first significant commission. In 1876, the wealthy businessman Ernest Hoschédé had commissioned Monet a series of large panels to decorate his home, the Rottembourg Château in Montgeron. The project was never completed following Hoschédé’s bankruptcy in 1877, forcing him to sell the castle even before the delivery of the panels. As such, the Durand-Ruel 1882 commission reveal Monet thinking not just as a painter of individual canvases but as an artist designing an integrated visual environment—a concept that would culminate in the immersive decorative cycles of the Grandes Décorations (Les Nymphéas), commissioned by the French state after the First World War and installed in the Orangerie a year after the artist’s death in 1927. Texto da Christie's.

Nota do blog: Data 2026 / Crédito para Christie's.