Water-Lilies, Reflection of a Weeping Willow

Water-Lilies, Reflection of a Weeping Willow (Nymphéas. Reflets de saule) is a two-meter-square canvas Claude Monet painted at Giverny between 1916 and 1919. Unsigned, it came to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris in 1966 with the bequest of the painter's son Michel (inv. 5122). It is number 1862 in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné, and it is one of the most nearly abstract of all his water-lily paintings.

What you're looking at

At first it is hard to find the lilies at all. The whole square is filled with short vertical strokes of lilac, pale violet, blue and white, falling in curtains from the top edge. These are the reflected fronds of a weeping willow, and they cover the water so completely that the pond reads as a single vibrating screen.

Look longer and the structure appears. Through the center runs a darker blue channel, roughly in the shape of a curving path, where the water shows between the reflections. In it float a few lily pads drawn as loose horizontal ovals. A long dark diagonal at lower left may be a branch or the edge of a pad. At lower right, a single pink-red flower opens beside a pad that Monet has painted with a looping, almost scribbled turquoise stroke, the most energetic mark on the canvas.

The effect is of soft, diffuse light, perhaps a hazy morning, with no strong shadows and no direct sun. Everything is reflection, and the willow itself is nowhere in view.

Where and when it was painted

In the war years Monet painted the weeping willows around his pond again and again. Their reflections became one of the main elements of the decorative cycle he was preparing, and in the Musée de l'Orangerie several panels are built around it. This canvas belongs to the experimental side of that work. It tests how far the willow reflection can take over the picture before the image of a pond disappears.

How it was painted

The paint is applied in dense, short, vertical touches, layered thickly enough that the surface has a woven texture. Monet keeps the tones close in value, so that nothing jumps forward except the flower and the turquoise pad. He was already suffering from the cataracts that would distort his color vision, and the dominance of violet and blue in canvases of these years has sometimes been connected to that, although the same harmonies appear deliberately in the finished Orangerie panels.

How this version differs

Among the Marmottan's late works, this is the canvas where the motif dissolves furthest. In Nymphéas (1916–19) the willow is a solid mass and the sky reflection is clear; in another Nymphéas of the same years the willow cascade occupies only the right side. The Orsay's Blue Water Lilies keeps the fronds as distinct dark lines. Here they are almost all light. Within the Water Lilies series, it points most clearly toward the all-over painting that later artists admired.

The late water lilies and modern painting

Canvases like this one were rediscovered in the 1950s, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other institutions began to acquire Monet's late water lilies. American critics and painters saw in their all-over composition and large scale a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism, and the comparison with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko became a commonplace. The comparison has limits: Monet always started from a real pond and a real tree, and he described his work as an effort to render what he saw. But a picture this close to pure surface helps explain why a generation of abstract painters looked to him.

Where to see it

The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris holds the largest group of late Monet paintings in the world, drawn mostly from Michel Monet's bequest. It shows them in a dedicated gallery, with works rotating and traveling. For Claude Monet's garden, see Giverny.