The Water Lilies: The Clouds

Claude Monet's The Clouds (Les Nymphéas : Les Nuages) is one of the eight great compositions of the Grandes Décorations, the water-lily cycle Monet gave to France and installed after his death in two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Made of three canvas panels joined edge to edge, it is 2 meters high and 12.75 meters long (inventory INV 20100), and it hangs in the first room alongside Morning, Green Reflections and Setting Sun. Monet worked on it from around 1914 until his death in 1926.

What you are looking at

There is no bank, no horizon and no sky: only the surface of the pond, seen as if you were standing at its edge and looking down. What you see in that surface is the sky. Across the middle of the composition, great white and pale violet clouds float in a field of blue, their soft, billowing edges painted in thick, swirling strokes. They are reflections, and the only thing that tells you so is the scatter of small, flat lily pads floating across them, painted as dark green and violet ellipses that lie on the water while the clouds lie beneath it.

The color changes as you walk along. At the left end the water is a cooler, greener blue, dense with pads and tinged with yellow-green. In the center the clouds are brightest, a mass of white, pink and lilac. Toward the right the reflections darken: a deep blue-black mass, perhaps the reflection of trees or of a darkening sky, closes the composition. Lily flowers are almost absent; this is a picture of sky and water, not of blossoms.

The detail to notice is the double space. The pads sit flat on the surface, small and foreshortened; the clouds seem to open up a great depth beneath them. Monet makes you see both at once, the surface and the infinite sky in it.

Where and when

Monet created his water garden at Giverny in 1893 and painted it obsessively from 1897 onward; see Water Lilies. In 1914, after the deaths of his wife Alice and his son Jean, he began a project on an entirely new scale: huge, continuous canvases that would surround the viewer. He built a vast studio for them in 1915. On the day after the Armistice in November 1918 he offered two panels to the French state as a monument to peace, and with his friend Georges Clemenceau the gift grew into the whole cycle. Monet kept working on the panels until he died in December 1926, and they were installed and opened to the public at the Orangerie in May 1927.

How this composition differs

Each of the eight compositions has its own time of day and mood. Morning is cool and fresh, Setting Sun is a single gold and violet glow, and Green Reflections is dominated by the dark green reflections of trees. The Clouds is the most open and airy: its subject is the sky in the water, and it is the one most likely to make visitors look up, as if the clouds were overhead. Its pale, high-keyed center contrasts with the darker Setting Sun in the same room.

How it was painted

The paint is thick and layered, built up over years of reworking. The clouds are swirling, interlocking strokes of white, pink, lilac and blue; the water around them is laid on in longer, horizontal strokes; the pads are flat, rounded touches added over the top. Seen close, much of it is nearly abstract, a quality that made the Orangerie panels a touchstone for American Abstract Expressionists after the Second World War. Monet's cataracts, operated on in 1923, affected his color perception during these years.

Where to see it

The Clouds is permanently installed in the first oval room of the Musée de l'Orangerie in the Tuileries Garden, Paris, lit by natural daylight from above as Monet wanted. For other public collections, see Where to See Monet's Paintings; for the artist, Claude Monet.