Weeping Willow and the Water-Lily Pond

Weeping Willow and the Water-Lily Pond is a late painting by Claude Monet, made at Giverny around 1916–19, in which the trunk of a weeping willow on the bank of his lily pond fills the left side of the canvas. Wikidata dates it to about 1916–17; the image circulating on Wikimedia Commons is labeled 1919. Its present collection and exact dimensions are not recorded in the open sources we could check, so the facts on this page are kept to what the picture itself shows.

What you're looking at

The composition is built on a hard vertical. A wide, rough trunk rises from the bottom edge almost to the top on the left, painted in streaks of ultramarine, violet, rose and green rather than brown. Monet treats the bark as a field of colored light, and the trunk seems to shimmer as much as the water beside it.

To the right lies the pond. The water is a strong, clear blue, crossed by the long green threads of willow fronds hanging down from above and by their reflections running down into the depths. A few flat green lily pads float in the middle and at the left edge, and a cluster of pink-lilac blossoms opens in the upper right. Along the bottom, a bank of grass and low plants is painted in quick strokes of green, yellow and orange, the only warm color in the picture.

The point of view is unusual for the pond pictures. Instead of looking straight down at the water, Monet stands back on the bank, so we see the tree, the ground and the pond together. The willow acts like a stage curtain, holding one side of the picture closed while the water opens out beyond it.

Where and when it was painted

Weeping willows were planted around the water garden that Monet created at Giverny from 1893, and in the years of the First World War they became one of his main subjects. Their trunks and drooping branches appear in a group of canvases now in Paris, Columbus, Fort Worth and elsewhere, and their reflections run through the panels of the Orangerie. Writers have often read the weeping willow as a figure of mourning in these years, when Monet had lost his wife and son and France was at war, though he never described the motif in those terms himself.

How it was painted

Even at small reproduction size the handling is visibly loose and fast. The trunk is built from long vertical drags of unmixed color laid side by side; the water from broad, flatter strokes of blue with greens laid wet into it; the grass along the bottom from short, broken touches. There is little attempt to model volume. The picture holds together through color contrasts, the cool blue-violet of trunk and water against the hot orange and green of the bank.

How this version differs

Most willow pictures in the Water Lilies series show the tree only as a reflection. Here it is solid and present, closer to the standing trunks of Weeping Willow (1918) in Columbus and Weeping Willow at the Kimbell, but with the lily pond added on the right. That combination links the willow canvases to pond studies such as Water-Lilies, Reflection of a Weeping Willow.

Willows at Giverny

Monet planted several weeping willows around the pond, and by the 1910s they had grown large enough to overhang the water. He painted at least ten canvases in which a willow trunk is the main subject, mostly in 1918–19, and the tree also appears, reflected, in many of the large water-lily panels. In the Orangerie, one of the eight great compositions is known as The Two Willows. A visitor to the garden today sees replanted willows in roughly the same positions, which makes it possible to stand where Monet stood and see how much of the arrangement in a picture like this one comes straight from the site.

Where to see it

We have not been able to confirm a public collection for this canvas, and it may be in private hands. For the many late Giverny works that are on public view, see where to see Monet's paintings and Giverny: Monet's House and Garden; for the artist, see Claude Monet.