The Water Lily Pond

What you are looking at

The arched wooden footbridge crosses the canvas from left to right near the top, almost touching the frame at both ends. Above it hangs a curtain of weeping willow, painted in long vertical strokes of yellow-green. Below, the pond is a dense carpet of lily pads and flowers, laid in with short horizontal touches of red, rust, violet, green and blue, with white and pink blossoms scattered through it. A tangle of tall iris leaves and grasses crowds the lower left corner. The signature and date, "Claude Monet 1900," run along the bottom left.

There is no sky. The bridge, the willow and the water fill everything, and the square canvas gives no direction more weight than another.

The 1899–1900 bridge pictures

Claude Monet settled at Giverny in 1883 and bought the house in 1890. In 1893 he acquired land across the road and dug a water garden, fed from a small branch of the Epte, with a footbridge in the Japanese manner. Its lilies would occupy him for the rest of his life; the garden and house are described on our Giverny page.

In 1899 he began a group of about a dozen nearly square canvases of the bridge seen from the same spot at the end of the pond. In 1900 he returned to the motif with a smaller group whose colors are hotter and denser, as here. This canvas is catalogued by Wildenstein as W.1630. The whole run of bridge pictures, from 1895 to the 1920s, is traced in The Japanese Footbridge.

How it was painted

The bridge is barely there. Its rails are a few strokes of pale lilac and green, set against the dark willow, and it almost dissolves into the foliage. What carries the picture is the surface of the water, especially the bands of rust and red that run across it. These are partly lily pads and partly reflections of warm light and trees. Monet layers strokes of many colors over each other until the eye mixes them.

Look at the lower right, where the pond opens into a pool of blue and violet: that is reflected sky, the only hint of it in the painting. And look under the bridge, where the willow's reflection makes a band of vertical green streaks in the water, mirroring the curtain above. The bridge is caught between two willows, one real and one reflected.

The square format, close to 90 centimeters a side, was Monet's choice for nearly all the bridge canvases of these two years; it removes any horizon and makes the pond a flat, all-over field. The paint is thick and dry in places, dragged over earlier layers so that underlying colors show through. Compared with the 1899 canvases, the touch is shorter and more agitated, and the foliage at left is heavier, almost a wall.

How this version differs

The 1899 group is cool and green; the best known is the Orsay's Water Lily Pond, Green Harmony, and similar canvases are in London, New York and Washington, among them Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies at the Met. The 1900 pictures shift the key toward red, gold and violet. The Orsay's Water Lily Pond, Harmony in Rose is the closest relative of the Boston painting, and the two are often read as afternoon or evening variants of the morning greens of 1899.

The change matters because it shows Monet moving from a single view repeated to a single view transformed by light, the logic of the series he had just begun with the Haystacks and Poplars. Twenty years later he painted the bridge again, almost buried in color, in pictures like The Japanese Bridge in Minneapolis.

Where to see it

The painting has been in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (61.959) since 1961, given in memory of Governor Alvan T. Fuller by the Fuller Foundation. Boston's large Monet holdings are described on Monet at the MFA Boston.