Water Lilies and Agapanthus

Water Lilies and Agapanthus (Nymphéas et agapanthes) is one of the large studies Claude Monet painted at Giverny between 1914 and 1917, while he was preparing the vast water lily decorations he later gave to the French state. The vertical canvas, about 140 by 120 centimeters and number 1821 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which received the contents of Monet's studio from his son Michel in 1966.

What you are looking at

The picture is split into two worlds. On the left, the surface of the pond tilts up toward us, crowded with lily pads painted as flat ovals of lilac, gray and pale green, each edged with a darker rim. Two blossoms burn yellow among them, the brightest notes in the canvas. On the right, tall stems of agapanthus rise from the bank, each topped by a burst of violet-blue florets that Monet draws with quick radiating strokes, almost like fireworks. Four flower heads hang in the upper right, at different heights, and their stems cross the canvas in long, thin, blue lines.

There is no horizon and no sky, only the reflection of sky in the water: a smoky mix of ultramarine, purple and olive across the top of the picture. The bank at lower right is a tangle of turquoise and blue-green strokes. Monet signed the canvas at lower left.

How it was painted

Everything here is painted wet into wet, with large brushes and a great deal of medium, so strokes drag through one another and leave streaks of mixed color. In places, especially along the lower edge, the bare weave of the canvas shows through, a sign that this was a working picture kept in the studio rather than a finished piece for exhibition. The lily pads are almost the only shapes that are closed and solid; around them, color is laid on as open, sweeping gestures.

The color scheme is narrow and unusual: violet, blue and olive, with yellow used only twice. That restriction gives the picture its mood, close to dusk, and makes the two yellow flowers glow.

Why agapanthus?

Agapanthus, the African lily, grew around the water garden at Giverny, and Monet tried it as a vertical counterpoint to the horizontal lily pads. The idea went further than this canvas. A huge three-part composition known as the Agapanthus triptych was planned with these flowers along its edge; Monet later painted them out, and the three panels, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, show only the pond. This Marmottan picture preserves the earlier plan, and with it a glimpse of how Monet worked in these years: trying an idea at large scale on a separate canvas, keeping or abandoning it, and only then committing it to the great panels. Dozens of such studies stayed in his studio until his death, which is why so many of them are now at the Marmottan. It belongs to the great Water Lilies project, which ended in the panels at the Musée de l'Orangerie, such as Water Lilies, Green Harmony.

A late style

By 1914 Monet was in his mid-seventies. His son Jean had died that year, the war began in August, and his eyesight was failing from cataracts, which dulled his perception of blues and made colors appear yellower and muddier. The heavy violets here are sometimes linked to that condition, though the choice was also deliberate: he was pushing color toward pure mood. Compare the crisp daylight of The Water Lily Pond, Harmony in Green of 1899 with this purple dusk, or with the earlier Water Lilies, Evening Effect. Our guide to how Monet painted explains the cataracts and the late style.

Where to see it

The Musée Marmottan Monet, in Paris's 16th arrondissement, shows it in the lower-level gallery devoted to the Giverny years, alongside other late Nymphéas and Japanese bridge paintings; see our hub on the Musée Marmottan Monet. The pond and the bank where the agapanthus grew can still be visited at Giverny. More on Claude Monet.