The Path through the Irises — The story behind it

How it came about

A bird's-eye view of a path between banks of irises, painted during the First World War when Monet was working at a scale far larger than anything he had attempted before. The brushwork is loose to the point of violence.

Where it fits in the series

The Garden at Giverny occupied Monet across several years, and The Path through the Irises belongs to the middle of that work rather than its beginning or its end. The early pictures in the group establish the motif; the late ones push it toward abstraction until the subject is barely holding the surface together.

Seen in sequence, The Path through the Irises is a picture in which the subject is still legible and the handling is already free. That combination is why this period of Monet's work is the most widely reproduced — it satisfies both the viewer who wants a recognisable scene and the viewer who wants paint.

The market story, briefly

Monet's market has been one of the most consistent in modern art. Works from the The Garden at Giverny group rarely come to auction, and when they do the prices are recorded in tens of millions — a level that has more to do with scarcity and provenance than with any change in how the pictures are regarded.

That is worth knowing for one reason: the price of a reproduction has nothing to do with the price of the original. A print is priced for what it is — ink, canvas, labour and shipping.

Provenance of the original

Remained in the studio at Giverny; later with Michel Monet and the Granoff gallery; entered the Met with the Annenberg collection in 2002.

Reading the date

1917 is the year usually given for The Path through the Irises, but Monet's working method makes single dates misleading. He kept canvases in the studio for months or years, reworking them when the season came round again, and he dated pictures by when they were begun as often as by when they were finished.

This matters when you compare the The Garden at Giverny pictures against each other. Two works dated to the same year can belong to visibly different stages of the series, because one was resolved in the field and the other was rebuilt in the studio afterwards.

The original of The Path through the Irises is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. We are not affiliated with the museum, and no museum endorsement is implied.