Waterlilies (1906, National Museum Cardiff)

Waterlilies is a 1906 canvas by Claude Monet of the surface of his lily pond at Giverny, in National Museum Cardiff (Amgueddfa Cymru), inventory NMW A 2487. Measuring 81.6 by 92.7 centimeters and signed and dated Claude Monet 1906 at the lower left, it is one of the Monets collected by the Welsh sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, and it is the palest of the 1906 lily paintings.

What you're looking at

The canvas is almost all light. A broad sheet of water fills the center, reflecting a sky of white and pale cream cloud, with lilac, pale blue and touches of yellow worked through it. Only the lily pads give it structure. At the top and upper right, long islands of pads in blue-green and teal float with pale pink and white flowers; down the left side a large cluster of pads in deeper blue-green carries pink blossoms; and across the bottom a row of smaller, darker pads, almost slate blue, holds a few pink and red buds.

In the upper left and top center, yellow-green and olive passages suggest the reflected foliage of trees on the bank, but they are soft and blurred. There is no bank, no horizon and no real sky. The lily pads seem to float on light itself.

The palette is high in key and cool: whites, creams, lilacs and pale blues dominate, with the greens of the pads and the pinks of the flowers kept delicate. It is one of the lightest canvases of the whole 1903–08 campaign.

The pond in 1906

Monet had dug the pond in 1893 and enlarged it in 1901–02. From 1903 he concentrated on paintings of its surface, the paysages d'eau. By 1906 he had dropped the bank and was painting only water, pads and reflections. In May 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibited forty-eight of these canvases, dated 1903 to 1908, in Paris under the title Les Nymphéas, séries de paysages d'eau (Water Lilies, a series of water landscapes). He destroyed many canvases he judged unsuccessful.

How this version differs

Chicago's Water Lilies of the same year is the natural comparison. Both have pads framing a central open passage of reflected sky. But Chicago's water is deep, saturated blue with drifting white clouds; Cardiff's is almost white, as if the sky were overcast but bright, or the light reflected straight off the surface into the painter's eyes. The pads here are bluer and cooler, the flowers paler. Earlier pictures such as Le Havre's dark Water Lilies of 1904 show how far Monet had moved in two years, from contrast to pure luminosity.

How it was painted

The open water is laid in with a dense, dry weave of short strokes, white over lilac and cream, the colors mixed on the canvas rather than the palette. The pads are painted with flatter, smoother strokes, their edges defined by darker blue. The flowers are single small touches of pink. There is little real dark anywhere in the picture, and the effect depends on small shifts of temperature, warm cream against cool lilac.

Ownership and where to see it

The Davies sisters of Gregynog in mid-Wales bought Impressionist paintings from about 1908, and Monet was their favorite artist; their bequests to the National Museum, Gwendoline's in 1951 and Margaret's in 1963, included several of his water-lily canvases. Cardiff also holds three of Monet's Venice paintings, among them San Giorgio Maggiore and The Palazzo Dario. For the series see Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; for other places to see Monet, Where to See Monet's Paintings.