The Water-Lily Pond (National Gallery, London)

The Water-Lily Pond is Claude Monet's 1899 view of the wooden footbridge across his lily pond at Giverny, in the National Gallery in London (NG4240). Measuring 88.3 by 93.1 centimeters and signed and dated at lower right, it entered the collection in 1927 and is one of the best-known of the bridge pictures. Its French title, Le Bassin aux nymphéas, harmonie verte, names its defining quality: it is the greenest of them all.

What you're looking at

The bridge spans the canvas a little above center, a shallow arc in blue-gray and dull green that runs off both edges. Above and behind it, the garden closes in: willow fronds on the left, painted in long, falling strokes of yellow-green; dark trees beyond the bridge in olive and bottle green; tall grasses and reeds along the far bank. Almost no sky shows. The light is soft and even, as if under a high, slightly overcast sky.

Below, the pond is a field of lilies. The pads are rendered as small flat touches of green, olive and yellow, in loose horizontal bands that recede toward the bridge. The flowers are mainly pink and rose, with some white, set as single dabs among the pads. In the gaps of open water, Monet places darker greens and browns, the reflections of trees, so that the surface alternates between floating leaves and depth. Along the right edge, a column of reeds rises in darker strokes.

The garden in 1899

Monet had rented the house at Giverny from 1883 and bought it in 1890. In 1893 he acquired the land across the road and railway, dug a pond fed by an arm of the Epte and built the bridge. Water lilies, which he ordered from the nurseryman Latour-Marliac, were planted in the pond. By 1899 the garden had matured, and he painted the bridge some dozen times from the same position, several of which Durand-Ruel exhibited in Paris in 1900.

How this version differs

Set beside its siblings, London's picture is the most subdued and unified. The Pushkin White Water Lilies is bright, with a nearly white bridge and blue in the trees. The Met's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies is lighter and warmer. Philadelphia's Japanese Footbridge is lusher, with more saturated color. Here the bridge is darker, close in value to the foliage, and the painting reads almost as a single field of greens, interrupted only by the pinks of the flowers. The Musée d'Orsay's Water Lily Pond, Green Harmony, whose title is nearly identical, is the closest relative.

How it was painted

Monet varied his stroke with the subject: long and vertical for the willow, short and stabbing for the trees, horizontal for the lily pads. The paint is fairly thick throughout. The bridge is laid in with long horizontal strokes, the railings with short verticals, and the palette is limited, built mainly from greens, yellows and blue, with pink for the flowers and touches of red-brown in the reeds.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting was acquired by the National Gallery in 1927, when interest in Impressionism in Britain was growing and the Courtauld fund was being used to buy modern French pictures for the nation. It hangs in the Gallery's nineteenth-century rooms in Trafalgar Square, where it is among the most visited Monets in Britain; the Gallery also holds Water-Lilies, Setting Sun. For the bridge pictures see The Japanese Footbridge; for the whole lily series, Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; and for other public Monet collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings.