Water-Lilies, Setting Sun (National Gallery, London)

Water-Lilies, Setting Sun is a canvas of about 1907 by Claude Monet showing the light of the setting sun on his lily pond at Giverny. It measures 73 by 92.7 centimeters and was bequeathed to the National Gallery in London by Simon Sainsbury in 2006 (NG6608). Monet kept it in his studio until 1923 and may have reworked it during those years, which gives it a richer, darker surface than most of his 1907 lily pictures.

What you're looking at

The pond is seen without its banks, bridge or horizon. Across the upper left, a band of warm light lies on the water: pink, peach and soft yellow, the reflection of a sunset sky. The rest of the surface is dark, a deep mixture of brown, green and violet, and through it run vertical streaks of darker color, the reflections of the weeping willows on the bank. The National Gallery points out that this balance of horizontal lily pads against vertical willow reflections is what makes the surface seem both flat and deep.

The lily pads are long, thin horizontal strokes in pale blue-green and gray, laid across the canvas like bars of light, with a few flowers as touches of red and pink at the right. At the lower left, a clump of reeds or grasses rises in thin, curved strokes, the only clue to where the pond's edge might be. The Gallery notes that these plants may have been added later: a photograph of Monet's studio taken around 1907 shows the canvas without them.

The pond at sunset

Monet dug the pond in 1893 and enlarged it in 1901–02. Between 1903 and 1908 he painted it again and again, mostly in daylight, and in 1909 Durand-Ruel showed forty-eight of these water landscapes in Paris. Sunset pictures are less common in that campaign. The low light, coming almost horizontally, sets the reflected sky aglow while leaving everything below the trees in shadow, and Monet uses that contrast as the subject.

How this version differs

Most of the 1907 lily paintings are cool and pale, like the Pola Museum's Water Lilies or the Wadsworth's silvery Nymphéas, or are built around a tall column of reflected light, like Houston's Water Lilies (Nymphéas). This one is warm and dusky, its palette of rose, gold, umber and violet closer to the late Orangerie panel Water Lilies: Setting Sun than to its contemporaries. The later reworking may account for that kinship: by 1923 Monet was deep in work on the Grandes Décorations, and a canvas left in the studio could absorb the new, denser handling.

How it was painted

The paint is thicker and darker than in most canvases of 1907. The willow reflections are dragged down in long vertical strokes; the lily pads are laid across them horizontally in lighter, cooler paint; the sunset band is softer and more blended. The reeds at lower left are painted in thin, wiry lines, distinct from the rest of the surface. The picture is signed.

Ownership and where to see it

Monet kept the canvas until 1923, when it went to the collector Henri Canonne, an early owner of many late Monets. It later belonged to Simon Sainsbury, a member of the supermarket family and a major benefactor of British museums, who left it to the National Gallery in 2006. It hangs in the Gallery's nineteenth-century rooms near the 1899 bridge picture, The Water-Lily Pond. For the whole series see Monet's Water Lilies; for the garden, Giverny; for Monet worldwide, Where to See Monet's Paintings.