Water-Lily Pond (Le Bassin aux nymphéas), 1917–19

What you are looking at

There is no bank, no horizon, no sky: only the surface of the pond, seen from above and filling a canvas twice as wide as it is high. Lily pads float in loose rafts of green and yellow-green across the left half and along the bottom. In the upper left, a cluster of red and pink water lilies glows against them. Through the middle of the picture runs a broad pool of open water, and in it the sky appears upside down: a reflection of white and pink cloud in a field of deep blue and violet. At the top right, dark vertical streaks of green and brown are the reflected trunks and hanging branches of a willow on the bank, which we never see directly.

The image is reflected world and floating world at once, and the eye keeps switching between them. A single pale lily at the right edge, painted in yellow and lilac, is easy to miss in the shadow.

Late Monet at Giverny

By 1914 Claude Monet was in his seventies, his eyesight weakening with cataracts, and he had begun the vast water-lily decoration later installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie. Alongside the giant panels he painted many canvases about one by two meters, which served as studies and as independent works. This painting belongs to that group. The Wildenstein catalogue raisonné lists it as W.1897 and dates it 1917–19. The garden that made all this possible is described on our Giverny page.

Many of these canvases stayed in Monet's studio until his death in 1926 and passed to his son Michel. This one came onto the market much later. It sold at Sotheby's New York in May 2021 for about $70.4 million with fees. It should not be confused with Monet's square Water Lilies of 1904 in the MuMa, Le Havre, a different and earlier composition.

How it was painted

The brushwork is broad and fast, very different from the dense dabs of the 1890s. Lily pads are single swipes of the brush, often outlined with a darker green. The cloud reflection is built from thick, curving strokes of pink, white and lavender, scrubbed into wet blue. Look at the upper left, where the red lilies are touched in with small, heavy blobs of crimson and orange; they are the brightest notes in the painting.

The willow reflections, painted as long vertical strokes, cross the horizontal rhythm of the pads at right angles. That grid of vertical and horizontal is what holds the loose surface together. In places the canvas shows through between strokes, and the paint has been dragged so that lower colors flicker up through upper ones.

The scale matters. At two meters wide, the picture is large enough that the viewer's field of vision is filled, yet small enough to hang in a room. Monet painted it in his big new studio at Giverny, built in 1915 for the Orangerie panels, where he could set several such canvases side by side.

The late water lilies and how this one differs

Monet painted some 250 water-lily pictures over three decades; the whole cycle is traced in Water Lilies (Nymphéas). The canvases of 1897–1908 are mostly smaller and often include a strip of bank. After 1914 the bank disappears and the format widens, as here and in Water Lilies of 1919 at the Met. This picture is notable for the strength of its sky reflection, which carves a blue channel through the middle of the composition, and for its warm red lilies, a note the Orangerie panels mostly avoid.

Set it beside the mural-scale Green Reflections and Setting Sun to see how Monet carried the same vocabulary of pad, flower and reflection up to the size of a wall.

Where is it?

The work is privately owned and not on public view. Monet's late water lilies can be seen in Paris at the Orangerie and the Marmottan, and in many museums abroad; see Where to See Monet's Paintings.