Nymphéas (1915, Musée Marmottan Monet)

Nymphéas is a canvas of 1915 by Claude Monet of his lily pond at Giverny, in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (inventory 5085). It measures 130 by 150 centimeters and is one of the large late lily paintings that remained in Monet's studio and came to the Marmottan with the bequest of his son Michel in 1966. It is one of the palest and most cloud-filled of them.

What you're looking at

The canvas is almost entirely reflected sky. Across the lower half, great white clouds billow in the water, soft rounded shapes of white and cream edged with pale lilac, as if the sky had fallen into the pond. Around them the water is a clear pale blue, deepening to lavender toward the corners.

Above, the water is crowded with lily pads, painted in pale blue-green and gray, some outlined in darker blue, forming a broad band across the upper half and a few large single pads to the right and lower right. In the upper left, a fan of fine, downward strokes in blue and gray suggests the reflected fronds of a weeping willow. There are almost no flowers, only a pale white one at the upper left and faint touches elsewhere. At the top edge, a band of yellow-green and cream may be sunlit foliage reflected from the far bank.

The color range is narrow and cool: whites, blues, lilacs, pale greens. The picture's drama comes from scale and from the clouds.

The late pond

After the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and of his son Jean in 1914, Monet returned to the lily pond in 1914 with the plan of a cycle of decorative panels, and in 1915 he built a new, larger studio at Giverny to paint them. Alongside the panels, which were installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in 1927, he made dozens of large canvases of the pond. Most were never signed or exhibited in his lifetime. At his death in 1926 they passed to Michel Monet, and in 1966 Michel bequeathed his father's collection, including many of these canvases, to the Académie des Beaux-Arts for the Musée Marmottan.

How this version differs

The Marmottan holds many late lily canvases, and they differ mostly in the reflection at their center. In Water-Lilies, Reflection of a Weeping Willow the willow dominates; in the Marmottan's Water Lilies and Agapanthus the bank and blue flowers frame the water. Here the subject is cloud. Compared with the dense, dark contemporaries in Gunma, Water Lilies (Nymphéas), and Potsdam, Water Lilies, it is open and luminous. Its reflected clouds anticipate the Orangerie's Green Reflections and the great Clouds panel there.

How it was painted

The clouds are laid in with broad, thick, curving strokes of white, worked into the blue around them while wet. The pads are thinner and flatter, brushed horizontally, some with a darker outline. The willow reflections are fine, dry, downward strokes. The paint is fluid and quick, typical of the studio canvases Monet used to test effects for the decorations.

Where to see it

The Musée Marmottan Monet, in a nineteenth-century hôtel particulier near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, holds the world's largest collection of Monet's work, much of it from Michel Monet's bequest, and shows the late lily canvases in a dedicated lower-level gallery. See Musée Marmottan Monet and Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; and for more on Monet's late years, How Monet Painted.