[MONET (Claude)]. -GEFFROY (Gustave). Signed autograph manus - Lot 187

[MONET (Claude)]. -GEFFROY (Gustave). Signed autograph manuscript entitled "Claude Monet". [Probably December 1924]. 6ff. in-8; binder holes in upper margins. Long, superb text on the painter, his career, his house in Giverny, his distinguished visitors such as Mallarmé, Clemenceau and Mirbeau... "The last time I went to Giverny, last month, November 1924, I found things there with the same aspect as on my first visit, in November 1886, the year I made Monet's acquaintance in front of the rocks and sea of Belle-Île.... He has the same enthusiasm as in the difficult hours, when the flame of art burned within him; he has the same tenacity, the same valour at work; he has the same refusal to be satisfied with the achievements of his painting, the same anxiety before the spectacles he wants to translate, the same discouragements, the same ardent resumption, the same will to conquer... I see all this again, and I think Monet sees it too, and with so many other aspects of things, and so many vanished faces, when he is leaning on the Japanese bridge, above the motionless pond, and his reverie is lost deep in the water lily pond, in the eternal mystery of water and sky..." An active supporter of the Impressionists, writer and art critic Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926) was a close friend of Claude Monet, whose biography he wrote (1922).