Water Lilies (1916, Tokyo)

Water Lilies of 1916 is a large, almost exactly square canvas, about two meters on each side, that Claude Monet painted of the lily pond in his garden at Giverny. It is in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, part of the Matsukata Collection that founded the museum, and it is one of the finest of the big wartime water-lily canvases outside France.

What you are looking at

The pond fills the whole canvas, seen from close above with no bank and no sky. The water is a deep, cool blue streaked with violet, and through it run long vertical strokes of green and blue: the reflections of grasses, irises and weeping willows growing at the water's edge, which we never see directly. Those vertical bands give the picture its rhythm and make the water feel deep.

Across this surface Monet sets the lilies in loose diagonal rafts. One group crosses the top edge, another floats in the upper right, and a larger island of pads in the lower half drifts toward the bottom right corner. The pads are painted as flat, rounded ovals in sage green, lilac and pale pink, each one defined by a few curving strokes, and the flowers are small, dense knots of crimson, rose and yellow. Toward the left, two dark red blooms sit almost alone on open water. The signature and date, Claude Monet 1916, are at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted this canvas in the second year of the First World War, when he was 75. His son Jean had died in 1914, his stepson and his younger son Michel were at the front, and Monet had just built a large new studio at Giverny so that he could work at the scale of the water-lily decorations he was planning. Canvases of this two-meter size served as studies and trial runs for the panoramas that ended up in the Orangerie. The pond itself, fed from the river Epte and planted with hybrid lilies, is described on our Giverny hub.

How it was painted

The picture was painted quickly over a light ground, in thin and fluid first layers followed by thicker, drier strokes on the lilies. Monet uses three kinds of mark: long vertical drags for reflections, short horizontal touches for the flat pads, and small twisted dabs for the flowers. The difference in direction does the work of perspective. There is no single light source; the blue of the water shifts from turquoise at the edges to near-violet at center, as on a still, overcast afternoon.

The square format matters. A square has no natural up or down, left or right, and Monet uses that neutrality to free the pond from the conventions of landscape. Nothing tells you where the bank is or which way you are facing; the lilies could be turning slowly on the surface as you watch. Seen in the gallery, at two meters across, the canvas fills the field of vision of someone standing close, which is exactly the effect Monet wanted from the larger decorations.

The series and how this version differs

The water lilies were Monet's longest series, about 250 canvases made between 1897 and 1926 and gathered on our Water Lilies hub. Next to the soft golden haze of the 1917 Water Lilies in Giverny at Nantes, the Tokyo picture is cooler, bluer and sharper, with more color in the flowers. It is closer in mood to the Marmottan's Water Lilies and Agapanthus and points ahead to the vast MoMA triptych, where the water expands to wall size.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged to the shipbuilding magnate Kōjirō Matsukata, who visited Monet at Giverny in the early 1920s and bought a large group of his canvases. Much of Matsukata's European collection was held in France during and after the Second World War; it was returned to Japan in 1959, and the National Museum of Western Art, designed by Le Corbusier, was built in Ueno Park to house it. The museum has since shown this canvas as a centerpiece of its permanent collection. For other public collections with Monet's late water lilies, see where to see Monet.