A Lasting Impression

For 40 years after the most impressionist of the French impressionists, Claude Monet, died, his son Michel lived genteelly off his father's paintings. By gradually selling off some of these atmospheric visions on canvas, Michel financed his passion for African safaris, which netted him horns, pelts and tusks that he installed in his villa 55 miles from Paris in the trophy room that he called "my museum." When his will was read, following a fatal automobile accident in February at the age of 87, it became obvious that Michel had had more than a museum of natural history.

In his custody were 140-odd paintings, the bulk of them by his father; their worth was appraised at $5,500,000. Claude Monet had also stashed away oils by such old acquaintances as Renoir, Delacroix, Manet, Degas, Signac and Pissarro. Their paintings were tucked under beds, stowed in the attic, stuffed in dusty cupboards. In his bedroom, Michel had in a single frame a sentimental pair of portraits by Renoir depicting a pipe-puffing Monet and his wife. Equally important to Michel was his father's palette, thick with oils, hung in the living room.

The best part of the bequest is Monet's studio house at Giverny, with its 50-odd works, where the aging and by then successful artist spent his autumnal years painting water lilies. He designed their pond, which had a Japanese bridge and was cared for by several gardeners who rearranged the moist pads and flowers to suit the artist's search for nature. Michel believed his father's closeups of water lilies in their fragrant, foliate delicacy to be only the result of cataract-blurred vision. Artists consider them masterpieces. Oddly enough, the entire bequest was left to the Academic des Beaux-Arts, whose members battled Monet during his early years. In fact, when finally offered membership, Monet refused. The will, however, specifies that the collection go to the academy, which will house them in the Marmottan Museum in Paris, far from the Louvre, which gave Monet the first show that France's first museum had ever accorded to a living artist.

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