Water Lilies (1914–17, Museum Barberini)

Water Lilies (Seerosen, Nymphéas) is a large late canvas by Claude Monet, painted at Giverny between 1914 and 1917, now in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam (MB-Mon-33). It is square, two meters on each side, and it carries the stamped signature applied to works left in Monet's studio at his death. It is part of the Hasso Plattner Collection of Impressionist paintings shown at the Barberini.

What you're looking at

The canvas is a single field of dark water. Its ground is a deep blue-green, and through it fall long vertical strokes of green, olive and dark blue: the reflections of willows and reeds on the bank, seen upside down, which give the whole surface a downward pull. Across these verticals Monet sets the horizontal shapes of lily pads, outlined in blue and violet and filled with pale blue-green, drifting in a loose band down the left side, a cluster in the right center and a scattering at the bottom.

There are few flowers. At the top, a group of white, violet and pale yellow lilies sits in a band of brighter pads. In the right center, a single yellow-white bloom glows among dark leaves, the brightest point in the picture. At the lower right, the water opens into a pool of deeper blue and violet, the reflection of open sky. In places, especially along the right edge, the canvas is left unpainted or only thinly covered, a sign that this was a working canvas rather than a finished, exhibited picture.

The effect is enveloping and somber, more like looking into the pond than at it.

The late pond

After the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and of his elder son Jean in 1914, and with his sight clouded by cataracts, Monet returned to the lily pond in 1914 with a new ambition: a cycle of enormous decorative panels that would surround the viewer with water. In 1915 he built a large new studio at Giverny to paint them. Alongside the panels, which went to the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1927, he painted dozens of big canvases of the pond, studies and independent pictures, most of which stayed in the studio, unsigned, until his death in 1926. This canvas, square and two meters across, is the scale of those studio works: big enough to fill the field of vision, small enough to be moved and compared.

How this version differs

Compared with the National Gallery of Australia's Nymphéas, a lighter canvas with a strip of bank and clearly drawn pads, the Barberini picture is darker, more vertical in its rhythm and more unfinished. It belongs to the same campaign as the vast canvases of those years, such as the Museum of Modern Art's three-panel Water Lilies, begun in 1914. Portland's Waterlilies of 1914–15 shows the same years in a brighter key, with white and salmon flowers. The completed Orangerie panels, such as Green Reflections, develop exactly this play of vertical reflection and horizontal pad on a monumental scale.

How it was painted

The reflections are dragged down in long, loaded strokes, wet into wet, with blue, green and violet interwoven. The pads are drawn quickly with a loaded brush, their outlines in a darker blue, their centers in paler paint. The flowers are a few thick touches. The bare canvas at the edges shows the speed and directness of the work.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting passed at Monet's death to his son Michel Monet. It later belonged to private owners, including the Basel collector Walter Schiess from 1982; it was offered at Sotheby's in December 1991 and not sold, and returned to the market in 2001. It has since joined the Hasso Plattner Collection and has appeared in the Barberini's exhibitions Impressionism: The Art of Landscape (2017) and Monet: Places (2020). For the series see Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; for other places to see Monet, Where to See Monet's Paintings.