Claude Monet - Lilac Irises / Iris Mauves

Lilac Irises (Iris mauves), 1914-1917 - Claude Monet, oil on canvas. Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926) was a French Impressionist painter. Monet painted about twenty views of the irises growing on the banks of his water-lily pond at Giverny. This canvas belongs to the earlier group, made in the same years in which he began the Grandes Décorations. Like most of those iris paintings, it is exactly two metres high, the height of the great decorative panels. Its narrow vertical format is rare in the group, and it may have been conceived as a pendant to a second panel of the same size. Monet used these canvases to test monumental scale, close viewpoints and broad handling. The painting remained in his estate after his death and passed to his son Michel.