From “An Impression of Chrysanthemums” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:
“In 1890 the dramatist and art critic Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) wrote to his friend and fellow plant lover Claude Monet:
“‘If you can send me a few more dahlias, yes, I would like that, And next year I’ll make you a collection of chrysanthemums I have which are all wonderful with crazy shapes and beautiful colours, I found them at a brilliant gardeners in Le Vaudreuil.’
“Their correspondence reflected the fascination that the Impressionist artist-gardeners had for the exotic chrysanthemum. Monet collected Japanese prints and ceramics, which also appear in his paintings at Giverny and still decorate the house there…. Chrysanthemums were an especial favourite of Monet (1840-1926) with their links to Japan and Japanese art traditions….
“Other Oriental plants favoured by Monet included bamboo, tree peony and the delicate blooms of the Japanese cherry trees. Monet used his gardens to experiment with colours and hues as well as horticulture, indeed the writer Marcel Proust famously recorded that Giverny was a ‘garden of tones and colours even more than of flowers, a garden which must be less the former florist-garden than, if I can put it that way, a colourist-garden’….
“Chrysanthemums were the perfect autumn flower for this effect, especially when planted in the bold masses that Monet favoured…. Between 1878 and 1883, working from Argenteuil, then Vetheuil and eventually at Giverny, Claude Monet produced some twenty floral still-lifes — including four entirely focused on the chrysanthemum.”
From “Thirteen White Chrysanthemums” by Chou Meng-tieh in The Isle Full of Noises: Modern Chinese Poetry from Taiwan, edited and translated by Dominic Cheung:
I partake of the universe’s feelings,
I partake of the maternal water and earth,
The paternal wind and sun.
I partake of you, chrysanthemums!
When grass sears, or frost deadens,
You bloom neither for one nor for everyone;
You, with sleepless eyes of autumn,
Multipetaled, multilayered,
The hearts of those who are dead you brighten
With your hosts of cold, flickering fires.
Hello!
This is the second of three posts featuring photographs of white and yellow mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, taken just before the onset of our last winter. The previous post is White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (1 of 3).
If the quotation up-top about Monet, his gardens, and Impressionism interested you, you can see some of his chrysanthemum paintings here…
List of paintings by Claude Monet
… by using your browser’s find function to search for the word “chrysanthemum.”
There will be a number of paintings of chrysanthemums in vases, but once you get to those Monet created in 1897, you’ll see the four paintings of mums in a garden referred to above. To my photographer’s eyeballs, the paintings allude to close-up photographs I might take to fill the frame with flowers, while changing the camera’s zoom level to get shots at different distances… as I often do, right here!
Thanks for taking a look!
