Claude Monet - White Clematis Tile

White Clematis (Clématites blanches), 1887 - Claude Monet, oil on canvas. Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926) was a French Impressionist painter. By 1887 Monet's passion for gardening had become increasingly specialised, and he was ordering unusual plants for Giverny. Clematis was among the flowers that attracted him. He chose an elongated format for this canvas, a shape linked by later scholarship to his interest in Japanese art and textile design. White blossoms spread across the narrow field with little conventional landscape space. The painting shows how Monet's collecting of plants and his search for new pictorial structures were already beginning to merge, years before the water-lily garden became his dominant subject.