Water Lilies

Monet painted this Water Lilies canvas in 1906, in his studio at Giverny, 50 miles west of Paris. He was 66 years old and had been painting the water garden he had created at Giverny for ten years. The Water Lilies series, which he would continue until his death in 1926, eventually comprised about 250 paintings. This version is one of the most carefully composed of the early group, painted at a moment when Monet was beginning to think of the series as his life's work. The painting shows the surface of the water lily pond at Giverny, seen from above, with no horizon and no sky. The canvas is filled with water: green, blue, and violet, with the reflections of trees and clouds visible on the surface. Water lilies float in clusters across the pond, their white and pink flowers painted in small, thick strokes of opaque paint. The reflections are painted in vertical strokes of green and blue, which give the water a sense of depth without showing the bottom of the pond. The edges of the canvas are dark, with the center lighter, creating a feeling of looking into a pool of light. Monet had built the water garden at Giverny in 1893, when he bought a piece of land across the road from his house and diverted a small tributary of the Epte to fill a pond. He planted water lilies, built a Japanese-style bridge, and surrounded the pond with bamboo, willows, and wisteria. The local authorities objected to the diversion of the river, but Monet won the argument by pointing out that his pond was a better use of the water than the swamp it had been before. By 1906, the garden was mature, and Monet was painting it almost exclusively. The Water Lilies paintings are the most radical work of Monet's career. They abandon the traditional structure of landscape painting: there is no horizon, no foreground, no background, no sky. The viewer is looking straight down at the water, and the only spatial cues are the reflections and the position of the lilies. The paintings are also the most abstract work Monet ever produced: the surface of the canvas is covered in patches of color that describe the water and the reflections without drawing them, and the boundaries between the water, the reflections, and the lilies are often impossible to distinguish. Oil on canvas, 89 by 94 centimeters. Monet painted with short, overlapping strokes, building the water in layers of translucent and opaque color. The lilies are painted in thick, opaque strokes of white and pink, which sit on the surface of the canvas like the lilies sit on the surface of the water. The reflections are painted in vertical strokes of green and blue, applied wet-on-wet, which gives them a soft, blurred quality. The surface has the rich, worked texture of a painting that has been built up over many sessions. The square format and cool palette make this print work well in a living room, bedroom, or any room with white walls. The greens, blues, and violets pair with white walls, natural wood, and rooms with a calm, contemplative mood. The 18x24 size gives the colors room to read. The painting has a meditative, immersive quality that suits rooms where people rest or think. The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection in 1933, as part of the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. This is a public domain artwork, scanned from the original at the Art Institute of Chicago. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.