Monet’s Palette

A few weeks ago I visited the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to see the “Monet’s Garden” exhibit. I’d known that Claude Monet was one of the principal painters of the Impressionist movement in France, but I hadn’t known that he passionately loved gardens, or that he designed his own extensive gardens at his home in Giverny. I enjoyed the roses, dahlias, daisies and numerous other flowers in the conservatory, and the water lilies in an outdoor pond. But what really delighted me was Monet’s palette.

It was displayed behind glass in a small gallery, along with two of his paintings. The palette was made of wood, and it had bright daubs of paint all over it, blue and green and yellow and red, as colorful as the flowers in the conservatory. The daubs bled into one another here and there, as though the artist had just been mixing them and had stepped away for a moment. I could imagine Monet holding the palette, looking at his flowers and then putting paint on his canvas in quick, broad strokes, like the ones in the paintings on the wall.

Seeing the palette made me think of a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty,” in which Hopkins—who was a Jesuit priest—praises God for the beauty and wonder of creation. He writes of the colors in the sky, the rose-tinted spots on a trout, the patterns of landscapes divided into fields and meadows. Then he praises human labor and “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.”

I love that line. It makes me think of the many kinds of work that people do, and the equipment they use. “Gear and tackle” could refer specifically to fishing or construction, but there’s a sense in which all of us use some kind of gear. The surgeon’s scalpel, the cook’s stove and pans, the mason’s trowel, the teacher’s books—they are the tools that allow workers to get the job done. Each tool is a kind of bridge between an idea in the mind and the completed work. When the worker is a master, and the gear is well-suited to the task, the result can be genius—as, for example, with Monet’s palette.

I thought of that palette again after a conversation with my sister. Her children are out of the house now, her daughter working and her son away at college, and she said that she misses “being a mom” and caring for them every day, even though she does challenging work as a registered dietitian.

I know what she means. Of course, she’ll always be a mother, but it’s also true that as life changes, our responsibilities and our “gear and tackle and trim” change, too. Kids leave, and it’s no longer necessary to use the biggest baking pan, or do laundry as often. We start a new job and have to learn a new computer program. Students in high school or college learn how to use unfamiliar equipment in the lab, or a different way to navigate the library. A new hobby, a new fitness program, a course in sacred Scripture bring new tools, a new vocabulary, new ideas.

In September, which marks a “new year” as school reopens and clubs and activities resume after the summer, I like to think about life changes as opportunities for learning new things. It’s good for all of us to be students at all times, as Monet was with gardening, especially in his middle years and beyond. He spent much time, money and effort in designing his gardens, including a water garden with a lily pond. He studied horticulture, drew diagrams, pored over seed catalogs and attended flower shows. In turn, his gardens inspired some of his finest work, and they still draw visitors today.

Of course, while he was planning them, he had to put down his palette and learn something new. The palette was there when he came back.