Water Lilies (1904, MuMa Le Havre)

Water Lilies (Les Nymphéas) is a 1904 canvas by Claude Monet of the lily pond in his garden at Giverny, now in the MuMa, the Musée d'art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre (A 486). Square in format, 89 by 93 centimeters, it was one of the forty-eight paintings Monet exhibited at Durand-Ruel in 1909, and the museum received it from the artist in 1910. It is the darkest and most dramatic of the 1904 lily pictures.

What you're looking at

At the top of the canvas a dense band of dark foliage, painted in deep greens and near-black, closes off the far bank. Below it, the pond spreads down the picture as a deep, shadowed mirror, its water a dark mixture of blackish green, bottle green and blue. On that dark surface float long horizontal islands of lily pads, catching sunlight in bright yellow-green and lime. Flowers are scattered over them: white and pale yellow near the center, and to the right and lower left clusters of pink and rose.

The pads are arranged in staggered bands that recede up the canvas, and in the gaps between them the reflections of the trees fall straight down as dark verticals. At the bottom, a few larger pads with pink blooms come close. The signature, Claude Monet, is at the lower right.

The contrast between bright pads and black water gives the picture a strong, almost theatrical light, like late afternoon sun striking the surface under trees already in shadow.

The pond in 1904

Monet had dug the pond in 1893 and enlarged it in 1901–02. From 1903 he worked steadily on views of its surface, which he called paysages d'eau. According to the MuMa, this canvas was painted over the spring to autumn of 1904 at the edge of the pond. In May 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibited forty-eight of these canvases, dated 1903 to 1908, under the title Les Nymphéas, séries de paysages d'eau, and this was one of them.

How this version differs

The 1904 pictures still keep a strip of bank or foliage at the top, unlike the later ones. The Denver Le Bassin des Nymphéas of the same year has a similar structure but is lighter, with silvery reflections and grassy greens. Dayton's 1903 Waterlilies is pale, all pink and blue reflected sky. Le Havre's canvas is the deep-shadow version: the reflected trees turn the water almost black, so the lily pads seem lit from within. It shows Monet treating the pond as a problem of contrast as well as of reflection. The museum notes that the near-total removal of topographical cues anticipates abstraction.

How it was painted

The dark water is laid in with long, vertical and diagonal strokes of mixed greens and blues, with very little white. The pads are built in short, thick horizontal touches of yellow-green over the dark, and the flowers are single dabs of pink, white or yellow. The top band of foliage is painted broadly and more thinly.

Monet and Le Havre

Monet grew up in Le Havre, where he first met Eugène Boudin and began painting outdoors. It was in the port of Le Havre that he painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872, the canvas that gave Impressionism its name. The town museum holds an important group of his works, and this lily pond, which came from the artist himself, connects the end of his career to its beginning. For the coast where he started, see Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

Where to see it

The painting is in the MuMa on the waterfront in Le Havre. For the series see Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; for other public Monet collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings.