Today we decided to take advantage of the rainy Parisian weather to visit the Musée l’Orangerie in the hopes of getting a close-up view of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas paintings. As we’ve posted before, the Nymphéas paintings depict a series of ponds with water lilies that existed around his house at Giverny. In the two viewing rooms at l’Orangerie, there are eight water lily paintings that surround the viewer, following the oval shape of the walls, each painting depicting water lilies at different times of the day, starting with the morning ending in the evening. The effect is simply incredible. Here’s a picture of one of the two viewing rooms from the official website:

When we arrived, we were happy to see that there weren’t many visitors and in contrast with our last visit in February, we were able to closely view the various paintings unhindered. It was a delight, to be sure.  Here’s just a few pictures that we took there; they’re more pieces since it’s difficult to get complete pictures, especially since the walls curve:

Of course, the colors are the first major draw and they depict the the scenes at different times of the day. The blues and greens are especially striking and have been the source of inspiration for a number of our designs. What was also interesting was that Monet used different brush strokes in his paintings, ranging from broad lines in his morning pictures to dots of paint in some of the afternoon and evening pictures. Also, in some areas, paint was layered on thick to the point where they created their own distinct textures and in others, the paint was layered on thinly. Overall, the effect is amazing and it was nice to be able to closely study the paintings. As for inspiration, there’s more in the future here at Lily Absinthe! 🙂