Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Autograph letter signed ('Claude Monet') to Gustave Geffroy, Giverny, 13 May 1921
In French. In pencil, four pages, 207 x 133mm, bifolium. Envelope. Provenance: Sotheby's, 29 & 30 April 1980, lot 327.

Announcing his intention to abandon the plan of giving his Water Lilies to the French state. Monet begins by providing the exact date of his first marriage; he has lost his letters from Courbet, which have been dispersed at auctions, but has some from Mirbeau, Mallarmé and Manet. He goes on to discuss the difficulties he has encountered in his planned gift of the Nymphéas (water lilies) to the French state: 'If I thought of giving my Water Lilies to the state, it was always with the idea of which you remind me. But for it to be inevitable, that state needed to be willing to show these decorations – on the conditions I had agreed. Since the state cannot give me this certainty, I absolutely abandon the plan, but in short it is rather the state which refuses my offer of a donation, and I regret it profoundly'. His psychological and physical state will likely prevent him from joining Georges Clemenceau for a proposed visit: in particular 'the state of my eyesight has worsened significantly and it can no longer bear light'.

Si j'ai eu la pensée (?) de donner mes Nymphéas a l'état cela a toujours été dans la pensée que vous me rappelez. Mais pour que cela soit inévitable, il eut fallu que l'état se montre disposé à montrer ces décorations - comme j’en avais convenu les conditions. L'état ne pouvant me donner cette certitude, j'y renonce absolument, mais en somme c’est plutôt l’état qui refuse mon offre de donation et je le regrette profondément.

Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926) is one of the first historians of Impressionism: his friendship with Monet dated from a chance meeting on Belle-Île in September 1886. The details Monet provides here are presumably for the second edition (1922) of his biography Claude Monet : sa vie, son temps, son œuvre. Monet's gift of his monumental series of eight Water Lilies to the French state for exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie was the subject of prolonged negotiations from 1918 onwards, in which Georges Clemenceau played a key role.