Musée de l’Orangerie: The Young Woman Sketching Monet (#695)

The Musée de l’Orangerie, at the western end of the Tuileries Garden, began not as a museum but as a winter shelter for the garden’s orange trees - hence its name.

Built in 1852, the long, light-filled building eventually found a very different purpose when Claude Monet offered a monumental group of his Nymphéas (Water Lilies) to the French nation following the First World War.

Monet was closely involved in planning how the paintings would be displayed, envisioning great panoramic canvases surrounding the viewer in two oval rooms illuminated by natural light.

Although he died in 1926, before seeing the completed installation, the rooms opened to the public the following year. What began as a home for orange trees had become something equally organic:

A permanent home for Monet’s garden at Giverny, transported into the heart of Paris.

There are museums you visit to look at paintings. This is such a museum.

And then there are people in museums who make you look away from the paintings. I had such an experience at the Musée de l’Orangerie.

At the Musée de l’Orangerie, surrounded by Monet’s enormous Water Lilies, I found myself watching a young woman sitting on a crowded bench.

Everyone else was looking at Monet.

The young woman was drawing him.

Or, more accurately, she was trying to capture what Monet had seen.

The Girl on the Bench

She sat squeezed among the other visitors, apparently oblivious to them.

Dark hair pulled tightly back. Black shirt. A small dangling earring. A bracelet around one wrist. Notebook balanced on her lap. Pen in hand.

She leaned forward with extraordinary concentration.

Look up. Look down. Draw. Look up again. Another line. Pause. Look again.

Who was she? I had no idea.

An art student? Perhaps.

That was my immediate assumption.

Maybe she was studying at one of the Paris art schools and had been given an assignment:

Go to the Orangerie.

Choose one section of Monet’s Water Lilies.

Draw what you see.

Or perhaps she was an architecture student learning to observe.

Maybe she was an American spending a semester in Paris.

Italian? French? Spanish?

Perhaps she wasn’t a student at all. Perhaps she simply liked to draw.

I never asked. And I’m rather glad I didn’t.

Not knowing left room for imagination.

Everyone Else Had a Phone

What made her particularly noticeable was what everyone around her was doing.

Phones were everywhere.

People entered the oval room, stopped in front of Monet, raised a phone and took a photograph. Then another. And another.

Some photographed themselves with Monet behind them.

Others recorded little videos as they walked around the room.

The entire sequence might take thirty seconds.

Monet. Click. Next painting. Click. Next room.

But the girl with the notebook couldn’t do that.

Drawing imposed an entirely different timetable.

To draw Monet, she first had to look at Monet. Really look.

Where does that branch begin? Where does the blue become green? Is that dark patch a reflection? How large is that water lily compared with the one beside it? Where exactly does one colour end and another begin?

She would look at the painting. Then at the notebook. Then back at the painting. Again. And again.

The rest of us were recording Monet.

She was studying him.

What Was She Drawing?

I tried discreetly to see her notebook.

There were lines. Shapes. Marks.

Nothing remotely resembling the enormous painting on the wall.

At least not yet.

And that, too, seemed appropriate.

Monet’s Water Lilies are difficult paintings to describe, let alone draw.

There is no obvious horizon. No conventional foreground. No background.

Sometimes you cannot even be certain whether you are looking at water or sky.

The trees appear as reflections. The clouds are beneath you. Water lilies float somewhere between the two.

Monet had dismantled the normal rules.

And now this young woman was trying to reconstruct them on a small piece of paper.

Monet Would Have Understood

Perhaps Monet would have liked her.

Because Monet himself was, above everything else, a man who looked.

He looked at the same haystacks repeatedly. The same cathedral façade. The same Houses of Parliament. The same pond at Giverny.

Again. Again. And again.

Not because the subject had changed.

Because the light had.

Morning was different from afternoon. Sunlight was different from cloud. Summer was different from winter.

A pond seen at ten o’clock was not quite the same pond at four.

Monet understood that seeing requires time.

So did the girl on the bench.

The Crowded Bench

The bench itself was packed. People sat close beside her. Bodies shifted. Visitors stood up.

Others immediately took their places.

Conversations floated around her in several languages.

People shuffled past. Someone probably bumped her. None of it seemed to matter. She remained bent over the notebook.

There is a particular kind of concentration in which the surrounding world disappears.

We sometimes call it flow.

Watching her, I could almost see it happening.

The hundreds of visitors vanished. The museum vanished. Paris vanished.

There was Monet. There was the notebook. And there was the next line.

Nothing else seemed necessary.

An Old Man and a Young Woman

Then another thought occurred to me.

There was something rather beautiful about the connection between the two of them.

Monet was an old man when he created these enormous paintings.

He was in his seventies and eighties. His eyesight was failing from cataracts. He had lost people he loved. Europe had been devastated by war.

Yet he continued to paint.

Not smaller.

Bigger.

He created these extraordinary expanses of water, flowers and reflection late in life.

And now, roughly a century later, a young woman sat beneath them with a notebook.

The old artist had spent years looking at his pond.

The young woman was spending perhaps an hour looking at what he had seen.

He had translated the pond into paint.

She was translating his paint into lines.

Giverny to Monet. Monet to canvas. Canvas to Paris. Paris to notebook.

One act of observation passing quietly to another.

Perhaps She Was Learning Something Else

If she was an art student, perhaps the real lesson had little to do with drawing.

Perhaps the lesson was simply:

Slow down.

That is surprisingly difficult to do in a museum.

There is always another masterpiece around the corner.

Another room. Another artist. Another object we have been told we should see.

The temptation is to collect them.

Monet: seen. Renoir: seen. Picasso: seen. Next.

The young woman with the notebook couldn’t collect paintings that way.

She had chosen one. And for a while, one was enough.

I Took a Photograph

There is, of course, an irony in all of this.

I admired her for not photographing Monet.

So, I photographed her.

She drew.

I clicked.

Perhaps that says something about the two of us.

Her memory of the Orangerie would be constructed slowly, line by line, through the movement of her hand.

Mine would be captured in a fraction of a second.

Yet the photograph has made me look again.

At her hands. At the pen. At the concentration in her face. At the notebook balanced awkwardly among the people crowded onto the bench.

And perhaps photography, at its best, can do something similar to drawing.

It can make us notice.

Then She Looked Up Again

She paused. Her pen stopped. She raised her head and looked once more at Monet’s enormous garden.

Around her, people continued arriving and leaving. Phones rose and fell. Shoes shuffled across the floor. Conversations started and stopped.

But she remained there. Looking.

Then she lowered her eyes to the notebook. And began drawing again.

I still don’t know who she was.

Perhaps an art student. Perhaps an artist. Perhaps simply a young woman who liked to sketch.

It doesn’t really matter.

Because for a few minutes in the Musée de l’Orangerie, surrounded by hundreds of people trying to take a little piece of Monet home on their phones, she reminded me of something Monet himself understood very well.

There is a difference between seeing something and looking at it.

And sometimes the best way to see more is simply to stop, sit down, and stay awhile.

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