Waterlilies (1903, Dayton Art Institute)

Waterlilies is a 1903 canvas by Claude Monet showing the surface of his lily pond at Giverny, with the reflected sky taking up most of the picture. It is one of the earliest of the "water landscapes" he painted between 1903 and 1908, and it is in the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio (1953.11), given in 1953 by the New York collector Joseph Rubin. It is signed and dated Claude Monet 1903 at the lower left.

What you're looking at

The bridge and the banks of the 1899 pictures are gone. What remains is the water, seen from a little above, and on it a series of floating islands of lily pads, each a flattened oval of green, yellow-green and cream, dotted with white and yellow blossoms. They step back in a loose zigzag from the lower center to the top of the canvas, getting smaller as they recede, which is how Monet suggests depth without a horizon.

Everything between them is reflection. Pink and mauve passages are clouds, blue and lilac ones open sky, and the soft green-gray areas, especially to the left, are the reflected trees on the bank. At the top left, real willow fronds hang down into the picture, drawn in fine strokes of green, the only element not lying on the water. At the lower left, a few pads with pink flowers sit in the foreground at the edge, close enough to show their shapes.

The effect is calm and slightly hazy, with a pale, high-key palette of rose, lavender and blue.

The pond in 1903

Monet had dug the pond in 1893 and in 1901 he obtained permission to enlarge it, giving it a broader surface and more open water. From 1903 he began a long campaign of paintings looking down at the water itself, a project he called his paysages d'eau (water landscapes). He worked on them for five years, destroyed many, and in May 1909 showed forty-eight at Durand-Ruel in Paris under the title Les Nymphéas, séries de paysages d'eau. The Dayton canvas is from the first year of that campaign, when a fringe of bank or willow still often appears at the top.

How this version differs

Compare it with the darker, almost nocturnal Water Lilies of 1904 in Le Havre, or the Denver Le Bassin des Nymphéas of the same year, where the far bank is still a band of foliage. Dayton's 1903 picture has already let the bank go and replaced it with willow fronds and reflected sky. By 1906, in the Chicago Water Lilies, the fronds have gone too, and the surface is entirely reflection.

How it was painted

The reflections are laid in with soft, blended strokes, often wet into wet, while the lily islands are built from crisper, horizontal dabs on top. The willow fronds are drawn in thin, downward strokes of darker green. The paint is moderately thick, smoother in the open water than in the pads.

Ownership and where to see it

The Dayton Art Institute's director in the early 1950s, Esther Seaver, approached a New York dealer and then the collector Joseph Rubin, head of the Loma Dress Corporation, asking whether he would consider giving the painting to a museum outside New York. Rubin agreed, and the canvas came to Dayton in 1953. It is one of the museum's signature works. For the whole series see Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; and for other places to see Monet, Where to See Monet's Paintings.