Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1907 (Houston)

Water Lilies (Nymphéas) is a 1907 canvas by Claude Monet of the surface of his lily pond at Giverny, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a gift of Mrs. Harry C. Hanszen in 1968. It is an upright picture, 92.1 by 81.2 centimeters, signed and dated Claude Monet 1907 at lower right, and it belongs to a group of vertical lily paintings Monet made that year in which the reflections of trees and sky form a column of light down the canvas.

What you're looking at

The structure is a vertical, which is unusual for a pond. Down the center of the canvas falls a broad, irregular band of white and pale lilac: the reflection of a sunlit tree, or of bright cloud between the trees, seen upside down in the water. It starts at the top as a narrow, bright shape, spreads into a cloud-like mass in the middle and fades into lilac at the bottom. On either side, the water is dark, deep blue-green and slate, streaked with the vertical reflections of foliage.

Across this vertical, Monet lays horizontal bands of lily pads. Near the top, a band of pads in gray-green with red and pink flowers; a little lower, another with yellow blooms; on the left, a cluster with pink and red flowers; and at the bottom, larger pads in pale green with a white flower and a blue-white one at the right, and pink blossoms at the lower left. The pads get larger toward the bottom, telling us we are looking down and away across the water.

The contrast between the pale column and the dark water makes this one of the most dramatic of the 1907 pictures.

The pond in 1907

Monet had dug the pond in 1893 and enlarged it in 1901–02. From 1903 to 1908 he painted its surface in the campaign he called the paysages d'eau. In May 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibited forty-eight of these canvases, dated 1903 to 1908, in Paris under the title Les Nymphéas, séries de paysages d'eau (Water Lilies, a series of water landscapes). In 1907 he experimented with format, painting tall canvases and even a few circular ones, and the vertical pictures, with their central fall of reflected light, are a distinct group within the series. Google Arts & Culture, describing the Houston canvas, places it in Monet's first concentrated effort to capture the flowers at different times of day and under varying atmosphere.

How this version differs

The Israel Museum's Pond with Water Lilies of the same year is almost a twin, with the same central column and bands of pads. The Houston canvas is wider in proportion and slightly cooler, with more blue in the dark water and the column of light more broken into cloud shapes. By contrast, the horizontal 1906 canvases, such as Chicago's Water Lilies, arrange pads around an open space rather than across a vertical. And the London Water-Lilies, Setting Sun uses the same willow reflections in a warm, dusky key.

How it was painted

The column of light is built in thick, dry strokes of white, lilac and pale blue, dragged so the underlying darks show through at the edges. The dark water is painted in long, vertical strokes of blue and green. The lily pads are short horizontal ellipses with darker undersides, and the flowers are small loaded touches. The two directions of stroke, vertical for reflection and horizontal for what floats, are the key to reading the picture.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting passed from the artist through Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune, belonged to the collector Henri Canonne, and later went through Alex. Reid & Lefevre in London. Mrs. Harry C. Hanszen bought it in 1968 and gave it to the MFAH the same year. It hangs in the museum's Audrey Jones Beck Building. For the series see Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; for other public Monet collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings.