Water Lilies (MoMA triptych)

Water Lilies is one of the great late panoramas Claude Monet painted of the pond in his garden at Giverny: three canvases, each two meters high and more than four meters wide, hung edge to edge so the picture runs nearly 13 meters along the wall. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which dates it 1914–26, bought it in 1959. It is also known as Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, a title that describes exactly what it shows.

What you are looking at

There is no bank, no horizon and no sky in the usual sense. The whole picture is the skin of the water seen from above, and the sky only appears upside down, inside it. Across the center of the three panels runs a broad band of reflected cloud, painted in warm creams, apricots and pale gold. Around it the water deepens into blues and violets, and at the far right a dark mass of green and blue-black suggests the shadow of trees on the bank.

The lilies themselves are almost incidental. Small flat pads, painted in quick horizontal touches of green, float in loose rafts along the lower edge and drift through the reflected clouds, with a few points of pink and white for the flowers. Because the pads lie flat on the surface while the clouds sink into the depth of the reflection, the eye keeps shifting between two distances at once. Standing close, you see only thick, crossing strokes; stepping back, the surface settles into water, light and air.

Where and when it was painted

From 1914, after the death of his wife Alice and of his elder son Jean, Monet built a huge new studio at Giverny so that he could paint water-lily canvases on a mural scale. His eyesight was failing from cataracts, the First World War was being fought less than a hundred miles away, and he worked on these panels for years, repainting and regrouping them. The motif was the pond he had dug at the bottom of his garden, described on our Giverny hub.

The project became the Grandes Décorations, the cycle he gave to France and which was installed after his death in the oval rooms of the Orangerie in Paris (see the Water Lilies at the Orangerie). Many panels stayed in the studio, unsigned, and were sold by his son Michel in the decades after. MoMA's triptych is one of these: closely related to the Orangerie compositions of reflected clouds, but never part of the state gift.

How it was painted

The panels are painted wet over dry in many campaigns, and the surface is heavy, layered and visibly reworked. Monet laid in large zones of color with broad brushes, then broke them up with shorter, curling and dragged strokes. Bare canvas shows in places at the edges. The palette is restrained to blues, violets, greens and warm cloud tones, with almost no hard contrasts, so that the picture reads as a single field of light rather than a set of objects. On how Monet painted we look at this late method in more detail.

The series

Monet painted the lily pond about 250 times between the late 1890s and 1926, gathered on our Water Lilies hub. Early versions such as Water Lily Pond, Green Harmony still include the bank and the footbridge. The later works lose the frame entirely. Compare this triptych with the near-square Water Lilies of 1916 in Tokyo, the wider Water Lilies in Giverny of 1917 in Nantes, or the Orangerie's Green Reflections. The MoMA picture is the only one in the United States that gives the full, wall-filling effect Monet intended.

Ownership and where to see it

MoMA acquired the triptych in 1959 with the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, the year after a fire at the museum destroyed an earlier large Water Lilies canvas it had bought. For many visitors it marks the hinge between Impressionism and abstract painting: the Abstract Expressionists in New York were looking hard at late Monet at precisely this time. It is usually on view in the fifth-floor galleries; for other late water lilies on public display, see where to see Monet.