Water Lilies (Saint Louis Art Museum)

This Water Lilies is a mural-sized canvas, 200 × 426.1 cm, painted by Claude Monet at Giverny and dated by the Saint Louis Art Museum to about 1915–26. It was originally the central panel of a three-part composition, the so-called Agapanthus triptych, whose side panels are now in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The Saint Louis Art Museum bought it in 1956 with funds from the Steinberg Charitable Fund, and it hangs in Gallery 218.

What you're looking at

There is no bank and no sky, only the surface of the pond stretched across four meters. Clusters of lily pads float in loose islands: a long group across the upper left and center, a smaller group at the lower left, and a chain along the right side. They are painted as flat ellipses in cream, yellow-green and pale lilac, with flowers in pink, red and gold set among them.

Between the clusters the water is the main event. Through the middle runs a broad zone of blue, violet and green, with vertical strokes of olive and gold rising from the bottom like the reflection of grasses or of trees on a bank outside the picture. Toward the top, the water lightens to a lavender haze that reads as reflected sky.

The picture has no single focus. The eye drifts across it as it would across the water, which was exactly Monet's aim for the panels he wanted to surround a viewer.

Where and when it was painted

From 1914 until his death in 1926, Monet painted dozens of two-meter-high panels in his large studio at Giverny for the decorative cycle he gave to the French state. Some were joined into the compositions installed at the Musée de l'Orangerie in 1927; others, like the Agapanthus triptych, were set aside. The triptych takes its name from the agapanthus plants that grew at the pond's edge and appeared in an earlier stage of the composition. The museum's broad date, c. 1915–26, reflects the many years Monet could keep reworking such panels.

How it was painted

Working on a canvas this size meant painting standing, at arm's length, with large brushes, and the strokes are correspondingly broad. The reflections are laid in long vertical drags, the pads in wide horizontal sweeps, and the colors overlap wet, so violets and greens blend at their edges. An estate stamp on the back confirms it was in Monet's studio when he died.

How this version differs

Among the large panels of the Water Lilies series, this one is cool and luminous, dominated by violet and blue rather than the gold of the National Gallery's Water-Lilies or the deep green of Zürich's Water Lily Pond, Green Reflection. Its left-hand partner is the Cleveland Water Lilies (Agapanthus); the Marmottan's Water Lilies and Agapanthus shows the plants that gave the triptych its name.

How the triptych was reunited

After the sale of 1956, the three panels of the Agapanthus triptych hung in three different American museums, several hundred kilometers apart. They have been brought together for special exhibitions, which have allowed visitors to experience the composition as Monet planned it: a continuous, curving wall of water roughly 12.8 meters long. The Saint Louis panel, as the center, carries the clearest cluster of lilies and holds the composition together. Seen alone, as it usually is, it still gives an idea of the scale Monet worked at, and of the way the late panels were designed to fill the visitor's field of vision.

Ownership and where to see it

After Monet's death the triptych passed to his son Michel, who sold it in 1950 to the Paris dealer Katia Granoff. When Knoedler's sold it in 1956, the three panels were separated, going to Saint Louis, Cleveland and Kansas City. The three have since been reunited for exhibitions. For other American museums holding Claude Monet's work, see where to see Monet's paintings; for the garden, see Giverny.