Le Bassin des Nymphéas (Denver)

Le Bassin des Nymphéas (Waterlilies, or The Water Lily Pond) is a 1904 canvas by Claude Monet of the lily pond in his garden at Giverny. Almost square, 87.9 by 91.4 centimeters, and signed and dated Claude Monet 1904 at the lower right, it has been in the Denver Art Museum since 1935 (1935.14), bought with funds from the Helen Dill bequest. It is the museum's most celebrated Impressionist painting.

What you're looking at

The view looks across the pond toward the far bank. Along the top runs a strip of grassy bank and shrubs in yellow-green and olive, and at the top center a pale gray-green mass of foliage, probably a willow catching the light. This narrow band of land is all that anchors the picture; everything below it is water.

The pond is organized in horizontal bands. Lily pads gather in long floating islands, painted in yellow-green, olive and gold, and dotted with flowers: pink and coral at the right and in the upper rows, white and cream in the middle, a few touches of red. The bands get narrower and closer together as they recede, so the eye travels up the canvas into depth. Between them, the water holds the reflections of the bank: long vertical strokes of green and blue-green falling from the top, and lower down, pale silvery areas where the sky is mirrored.

At the bottom of the canvas the pads thin out, and the water becomes a broad passage of reflected light and shadow in green, lilac and gray, with a small blue-violet shape at the lower center, perhaps a reflected patch of sky or a flower below the surface. The signature is set in red against this water.

The pond in 1904

Monet had dug the pond in 1893 and enlarged it in 1901–02, widening the open surface. From 1903 he concentrated on paintings of that surface, which he called paysages d'eau. In May 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibited forty-eight of these canvases, dated 1903 to 1908, in Paris under the title Les Nymphéas, séries de paysages d'eau (Water Lilies, a series of water landscapes). Many of the 1904 canvases keep, like this one, a strip of bank at the top; over the next years Monet would lower his gaze until the bank disappeared altogether.

How this version differs

The 1904 water landscapes share a structure, but not a mood. Le Havre's Water Lilies of the same year has black, shadowed water and glowing pads, a high-contrast picture. Denver's is lighter and more even, its water silvery and its colors grassier. Dayton's 1903 Waterlilies is paler still, a field of pink and blue sky. Compared with the Chicago Water Lilies of 1906, where no bank appears, the Denver canvas is still a landscape with a far shore, a step between the 1899 bridge pictures and the pure water surfaces to come.

How it was painted

Monet varied the stroke with each element: short horizontal dabs for the pads, single thicker touches for the flowers, long vertical drags for the reflections, and loose, blended strokes for the open water at the bottom. The palette is mainly greens and yellows, with pinks and lilacs in the reflections and flowers.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting stayed with the artist before passing through the Durand-Ruel galleries in Paris and New York. It was owned by Katherine Wolcott Toll of Denver, and the museum acquired it in 1935. It has been shown widely, including in Denver's exhibitions Nature as Muse (2013–14) and Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature (2019–20). It is on view in the museum's European art galleries. For the series see Monet's Water Lilies, for the garden Giverny, and for other public collections of Monet, Where to See Monet's Paintings.