Water Lilies, Evening Effect

Water Lilies, Evening Effect (Nymphéas, effet du soir) belongs to the very first group of paintings Claude Monet made of the lily pond he had created in his garden at Giverny. Dated 1897 by the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which owns it, the canvas measures 73 × 100 cm and came to the museum in 1966 with the bequest of the artist's younger son, Michel Monet. It is stamped "Claude Monet" at the lower left with the studio stamp used on works left in the artist's possession at his death, a sign that Monet never sold or exhibited it.

What you're looking at

There is no bank, no sky, no bridge, nothing but the surface of the water seen from above at close range. A loose cluster of round lily pads drifts across the center and lower half of the canvas, and in the middle of them two water lilies have opened, their petals white touched with pink and their centers a soft yellow. A smaller pink bud rises just above them, and at the far right, cut off by the edge, a pad is rimmed with rust-red.

The water fills everything else. Monet paints it in long, diagonal strokes of blue, violet and gray-green, laid down quickly, as if dragged across the surface by the evening breeze. At upper left the strokes lighten into a pale lilac haze, the reflection of the sky at dusk. Toward the bottom the water darkens to blue-green. The pads are brushed in flatter, denser paint, pale green with white highlights, and their edges are softened so they seem to sit just under rather than on the surface.

The detail most viewers miss is the absence of a horizon. Without it, there is no up or down in the usual sense: the canvas is a horizontal slice of water viewed from above, and the reflected evening light, rather than any object, gives the picture its mood. Monet would build on that idea for the rest of his life.

A first step toward the great Water Lilies

Monet bought land beside his Giverny property in 1893, diverted a branch of the river Epte, and dug a pond that he planted with hybrid water lilies. For several years he painted the garden mainly from the bank, with the footbridge as the anchor, as in Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies of 1899. Water Lilies, Evening Effect and a few related canvases of the late 1890s are different: they drop the bridge and the banks and focus on the water's surface alone.

These were experiments, and Monet kept them. A decade later he began exhibiting large, horizonless views of the pond, and after 1914 he embarked on the huge decorative panels now installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Seen from that perspective, this modest canvas is one of the seeds of the whole Water Lilies project.

How it was painted

The brushwork is broad and rapid, consistent with a study made in a single session or a few short ones as the light faded. Monet's interest in "effects," such as morning, evening, frost or fog, was central to his work from the 1880s; the phrase effet du soir tells us that the subject is not the flowers themselves but how they look at a particular hour. Evening light lowers the contrast and pushes the whole palette toward blue and violet, which is exactly what we see here.

Meaning

There is no symbolism in the traditional sense. The painting is about looking slowly: about how water, flowers, reflected sky and changing light merge into a single surface. In his last decades the water garden became almost his only subject, and later writers have often described the lily paintings as meditative, even spiritual, an effect that begins in quiet works like this one.

Not to be confused with

Searches for this painting often turn up Monet's bridge pictures of 1899, which show the same pond from the bank. For those, see Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, The Japanese Footbridge and Water Lily Pond, Harmony in Rose. Monet also painted a later Water Lilies, Sunset. For the full story, see Famous Monet Paintings.

Where to see it

The Musée Marmottan Monet, 2 rue Louis-Boilly, Paris (16th arrondissement), which holds the world's largest collection of Monet's work, much of it from Michel Monet's bequest. The painting is in the public domain.