Irises by the Pond

Irises by the Pond is a large late canvas by Claude Monet showing irises growing at the edge of his water lily pond at Giverny. He painted it around 1914–17, in the years when he was also working on the great water lily decorations. The canvas measures about 199.5 by 150.5 centimeters, is number 1832 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (accession number 71.8).

What you are looking at

There is no horizon, no sky and no bank in the ordinary sense. Monet stands almost on top of his subject and fills a canvas taller than a person with leaves, flowers and water seen from close range.

Down the right side and across the bottom, the long, blade-shaped leaves of irises spring up and arch over in sweeping strokes of yellow-green, olive and ochre. Some are single strokes more than a hand long, laid with a loaded brush that thins out at the tip just as a leaf does. Among them, the flowers appear as loose clusters of pink, mauve and rose, the largest group at upper right, with a smaller spray drifting toward the center. None is drawn. Each bloom is two or three twisted touches of paint.

At the left, the leaves give way to water. Here the paint turns to blue and violet in long vertical drags, which read as the shadowed surface of the pond or as reflections of the plants on it. Near the top a band of rust-orange and dark green, perhaps overhanging foliage or its reflection, closes off the space, and a single patch of brighter blue opens in it like a window onto reflected sky.

Reproductions of this picture vary a good deal. Older color plates, like the one shown here, push it toward hot violet and orange; the museum's own photograph is greener and cooler, with lilac flowers. In both, the structure is the same: a diagonal surge of leaves from lower right toward upper left, set against a cool field of water.

Where and when was it painted?

The irises grew along the banks of the water garden that Monet had created across the road from his house at Giverny, described on our Giverny page. He had planted irises of several kinds, both in the flower garden in front of the house and around the pond, where their spiky leaves set off the flat pads of the water lilies.

From about 1914, after a period of grief and failing eyesight, Monet threw himself into a vast project: a cycle of mural-sized water lily paintings. In 1915 he built a huge new studio to house them. Alongside the Water Lilies themselves he painted dozens of large canvases of the pond's edges, with irises, agapanthus, wisteria and weeping willows, each a single plant enlarged to wall scale. This painting belongs to that campaign.

How was it painted?

The brushwork is fast, thick and physical. Monet used large brushes and worked with long, decisive movements, often wet into wet, so the strokes drag through one another and leave ridges of paint. Up close the image nearly disappears into marks of color; from across a room the plants reassemble.

His eyesight is part of the story. Monet had been diagnosed with cataracts in 1912, and over the following decade his color grew stronger and less naturalistic, with heavy blues and violets set against hot yellows, oranges and reds. Our page on how Monet painted traces that change. Whether this canvas is a study, a fragment of a larger plan or a finished work in its own right is not certain; like most of the late pond paintings, it was never exhibited in his lifetime.

How does it relate to Monet's other irises?

Irises run through Monet's work at Giverny. The early Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny of 1887 shows them as a band of color in an open landscape, and The Artist's Garden at Giverny of 1900, in the Musée d'Orsay, floods the flower garden with violet blooms. In the late canvases the scale changes completely, and the viewer is pushed into the plants. The closest relatives of this picture are the other iris canvases of about 1914–17, of similar size, including one in the National Gallery in London, and the late Agapanthus.

These pictures stayed in the Giverny studio after Monet's death in 1926. When they began to reach museums in the 1950s, critics saw in their scale and freedom a link to the large abstract canvases of American painters of that decade.

Where can you see it?

Irises by the Pond is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. For other collections with late Giverny paintings, see our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.