Was Monet a Biophilic Artist?

I have been wrapping my head around this for some time now.

🤔 What differentiates an artist as being a biophilic artist?

Is it because they paint a field of poppies, or a vase of sunflowers? Is it because they carve in a natural medium — marble, or wood?

I don't think it's that simple. My working definition is this: art becomes biophilic when it successfully evokes the essence of nature and offers a restorative experience akin to being in a natural environment. Three things seem to matter:

🍃 The theme. The underlying imagery must clearly come from the natural world.

🍃 The experience. That's not sufficient on its own — the piece has to be immersive. It has to feel alive, dynamic, sensory; it has to invite the viewer to slow down and stay a while, rather than glance and move on.

🍃 The intention. The artist has to be trying to bring the viewer closer to nature and its benefits — not simply producing a pretty picture of it.

So: was Monet a biophilic artist? I 'm not sure so to look at it a bit deeper  means going back to the man, the garden, and the pond — because I think the story is more tangled than it first appears.

The garden that came before the paintings

Here is the detail that changed how I think about this.

Monet didn't plant water lilies in order to paint them. When he bought the extra plot of land at Giverny in 1893 and diverted the little river Ru to build his pond, he wasn't stocking a studio prop — he was building a garden, full stop. He said so himself: he chose the lilies "for the pleasure of it," and grew them "without ever thinking of painting them." The subject came second. The nature came first — Monet was, in many ways, as much a horticulturist as a painter, and the garden reads that way.

That is worth sitting with, because it inverts the question I started with. I'd been asking whether Monet intended his paintings to be restorative for the viewer. But the more interesting intention was earlier and more private: Monet needed the garden for himself, decades before it became his life's great subject. He called it his most beautiful masterpiece — and he meant the garden, not the canvases.

Only later, almost against his own resistance, did the pond take over. For over tens of years and more of his life it became close to his only subject: some 250 canvases, mostly of nothing but water, lilies, sky, and their reflections — he'd stopped even including the banks. He rose at four to watch dawn light move across the surface. And by his own account, this obsession was not peaceful to produce. Water, he said, is "such a mobile subject" that trying to paint it "is enough to make one insane." He wanted to paint "the air" around things, "the beauty of the air" — and called that ambition "nothing short of impossible."

photo credit : hakelbudel

So here is a strange asymmetry: the garden was built for Monet's own restoration, but the painting of it seems to have been closer to torment than to calm. Which raises a real question for my third criterion — intentionality. If the artist's own process wasn't restorative, does the work stop qualifying as biophilic? Or does biophilic art only need to land as restorative for the person receiving it, regardless of what it cost the person making it?

What the research says about the feeling itself

Attention Restoration Theory — developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan — describes how natural scenes hold our attention effortlessly, in a way that lets the part of our brain responsible for deliberate focus finally rest. They call this "soft fascination": engagement without strain. Roger Ulrich's parallel work on stress recovery found something similar happening physiologically, not just cognitively — natural scenes measurably calm us, image or environment alike.

So when I myself visted Giverny, standing at that pond, time did something strange. I wasn't thinking about the painting anymore. I wasn't really thinking about Monet. I was just there, mildly disoriented in the nicest possible way, recalibrating. I don't think I would describe it as awe in the sense of Keltner & Haidt but certainly "soft fascination"or even "quiet awe". (maybe because I knew what to expect). 

On the other hand , Monet, decades earlier, must have stood at the edge of that same water and felt something even more powerful, enough to make him buy the land, redirect a river, and fight off the objecting farmers, just to keep looking at it. Whatever we want to call that first impulse, it was strong enough to organise the rest of his life around it.

The war he painted through

So why was he "tormented"?

But there's a piece of this story I hadn't fully reckoned with until I went looking for it, and it changes the question again. Monet began the water lily series in earnest in 1914 — the same year his son Jean died, only three years after he had lost his wife Alice, and the same year he was diagnosed with the cataracts that would slowly cloud his sight for the rest of his life. And it is, of course, also the year the First World War broke out, close enough to Giverny that gunfire from the front was sometimes audible from his garden.

He refused to leave. He wrote to a friend that if "those barbarians" wished to kill him, he would die among his canvases. He brought vegetables from his garden to wounded soldiers at a small hospital nearby. And he kept painting water lilies — to the point of feeling guilty about it. In a letter from December 1914 he confessed that returning to work was "the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times," and admitted he felt almost ashamed. One group of paintings from this period even brings in the weeping willow, a traditional symbol of mourning, its branches hanging low over the reflections.

And yet, whatever this was costing him personally, his intention for the finished work was completely clear. The day after the Armistice, he offered the French state a set of these vast canvases as what he called a monument to peace. He wanted them to hang somewhere the public could sit inside them, surrounded on every side, and find a kind of calm — a deliberate act of healing aimed squarely at a nation that had just spent four years being anything but calm. They hang today, exactly as he intended, in two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie.

So which is it? Was the painting restorative for him — a way of holding onto beauty and sanity while grief, failing eyesight, and a war pressed in from every side? Or was it technically punishing, even distressing, precisely because he couldn't fully separate the work from what was happening to him and around him? I think both readings are true at once. He may have been tormented in the making — worn down by the technical impossibility of the subject, and by grief and war he couldn't paint his way out of — while still fully intending the result to restore something in the people who would eventually stand in front of it. The suffering was his. The gift, quite deliberately, was not.

Which brings me to the real question underneath all of this:

for art to count as biophilic, does the restorative effect need to belong to the artist too — not just to us, standing in front of the finished canvas a century later?

Or is it enough that nature moved through him, however painfully, and came out the other side still carrying some of its calm?

So, was Monet a Biophilic Artist?

I don't think I can answer that cleanly, and I'm not sure I want to.

If biophilic art requires the benefit to belong to the artist as much as the viewer, Monet complicates the test rather than failing it: the garden restored him, the war and grief undid him a little, and the painting of the lilies seems to have been both refuge and torment.

If instead biophilic art only requires that the finished work carries nature's restorative charge to whoever stands in front of it, regardless of what it cost the person who made it, then a room full of Water Lilies might be one of the most biophilic pieceof art  ever produced — created, in part, out of a man's need to look away from horror.

Maybe the answer depends on which moment we're judging: the gardener planting lilies "for the pleasure of it," the grieving father working through cataracts with a war at his doorstep, or us, a century later, standing at the edge of the same water with none of that weight, simply mesmerised.

So — to what extent should the beneficial effects of biophilic art belong to the artist, and not only the viewer?

And was Monet's relationship to his own water lilies really intentional biophilic art, or was it something closer to therapy that happened to leave the rest of us something beautiful?

I don't have a tidy answer. I'd love to know where you land.

 

Author : Odile Smith

 

MORE ON MONET: Frequently asked questions

What is biophilic art? Art that evokes nature strongly enough to offer a restorative experience — through a natural theme, an immersive sensory quality, and the artist's intent to connect viewers to nature's benefits.

Was Claude Monet a biophilic artist? Debatable: his water lily paintings are immersive and were deliberately gifted as a restorative "monument to peace," but Monet described painting them as technically tormenting — raising whether biophilic art must also restore the artist, not just the viewer.

Why did Monet paint water lilies during World War One? He intensified the series from 1914, the year his son died and gunfire from the front reached Giverny, calling the work a way to avoid dwelling on "these sad times."

What is Attention Restoration Theory? A psychological theory (Rachel and Stephen Kaplan) holding that natural scenes hold attention effortlessly — "soft fascination" — letting the mind's focus recover.

Did Monet build his Giverny garden in order to paint it? No — he built it in 1893 for his own pleasure and only began painting it seriously years later.