All tours · Fifteen Masterpieces · Room 14 · Impressionism

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1906
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Room 14

Water Lilies

Claude Monet1906Oil on canvas89.9 × 94.1 cm

The story of this room

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After a room crowded with patterns, this one lets your eyes breathe. Leo stops in front of the canvas and turns to you. Quick question, he says. Where is the sky in this painting? Look up: water. Look down: more water. There is no bank, no horizon, no strip of land anywhere.

And yet the sky is right here. Look at the hazy pale blue on the left side of the middle. Those are clouds, reflected in the pond. The dark green shadows slanting across them are trees on the bank, also seen only as reflections. We are looking down into a pond and up at the sky at the same time.

Now follow the lily pads. They gather in the lower left and the upper right, and between them a path of open water runs on a slant. Near the bottom, a few pink flowers float on their own. Step closer and each flower falls apart into a handful of quick strokes: pink, violet, a touch of orange. Leo lifts his silverpoint, then lowers it again. I can't trace this with a line, he admits.

Check the lower right corner too. The signature is written in reddish brown paint, and it ends with a date: 1906. Claude Monet put the year there himself.

Monet bought his house at Giverny, in France, in 1890. Three years later he made a water garden there. At first he painted the wooden Japanese-style bridge that crosses the pond. Little by little he let the bank and the bridge go, until only the water's surface filled the canvas. Over the next two and a half decades the pond gave him around 250 paintings.

This one belongs to a group of water lily pictures he made between 1903 and 1908. Even the nearly square canvas was part of the plan. With no wide landscape shape, there is no room for land or sky, only water. Monet called this work an obsession. When the Art Institute of Chicago examined the canvas, it found many significant changes he made while painting it.

In 1909 the picture was listed in the catalogue of his water lily exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris. Years later the same pond would grow into the huge water lily murals of the Musée de l'Orangerie.

The next room is the last one on our walk. A girl painted by a Viennese artist is waiting there, feet planted wide, looking straight back at us.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

  1. Zoom into the pink flower near the bottom center. The petals are just a few touches of pink and white, and the base is a few dabs of violet and orange-red. Up close it is a little heap of paint. Step back and it becomes a lily floating on the water.

  2. Now move to the soft, hazy area at the upper left. The dark green streaks hanging downward are trees on the bank, seen upside down in the water. The pale violet patch beside them is a cloud reflected on the surface. In this painting, the only way to see the sky is through the water.

  3. Look at the band of lily pads at the upper right. Pale yellowish-white blossoms are dotted among the light green leaves. The pads stretch across the water in long horizontal strips. Together with the cluster at the lower left, they frame the wide open path of water in the middle.

  4. Zoom into the pads along the lower left edge. They are made with curling, circular strokes, with pink, white and violet laid on top. A red blossom is tucked in among them. These pads are larger and rougher than the distant ones, which tells you they are closest to where you are standing.

  5. Finally, check the lower right corner. In brown paint, Monet signed Claude Monet 1906. The signature seems to float on the surface like everything else in the picture.