White Water Lilies

White Water Lilies (Nymphéas blancs) is Claude Monet's 1899 view of the Japanese footbridge over his water-lily pond at Giverny, one of about a dozen canvases he painted of the motif that summer. It measures 89 by 93 centimeters and is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (Ж-3309). It was bought by the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin, whose Monets are among the finest outside France.

What you're looking at

A pale bridge arches across the upper third of the canvas, from the left edge to the right. Its railings are painted almost white with touches of pale green, and the walkway underneath is a darker green band. Behind it rises the garden: a weeping willow at the upper left, its fronds falling in long silver-green strokes, and beyond the bridge dense trees and shrubs in green and blue-green. In the upper right, patches of blue and lavender break through the foliage, either sky or deep shadow, and they give this version its cool, airy light.

The pond below is crowded with lilies. The pads are short horizontal touches of green and yellow-green; the flowers, despite the title, include pinks and roses as well as many whites, set as small dabs of thick paint in rows. Between the clusters, the open water reflects the trees and sky in blue, violet and dark green, and at the very bottom a few larger pads and blossoms come close. At the right, tall reeds and an iris-like clump rise from the bank, painted in violet and red-brown.

The garden in 1899

Monet had bought the Giverny house in 1890 and in 1893 added a plot of land on the far side of the road and railway, where he dug a pond fed by a diverted arm of the Epte. He planted it with water lilies and built the arched wooden bridge, painted green. By 1899 the plantings had grown in, and that summer he set up on the bank facing the bridge and painted it again and again, a series exhibited in part at Durand-Ruel in late 1900.

How this version differs

Compared with its siblings, the Pushkin picture is the brightest and coolest. The National Gallery's The Water-Lily Pond is deep green, almost shadowed, its bridge gray-blue. The Philadelphia Japanese Footbridge is fully saturated green. The Met's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies is close in brightness but warmer. Here the bridge is nearly white, there is more blue and lilac in both foliage and water, and the flowers are more numerous and more varied. It is the version where the pond seems most fully in flower and the day most clearly bright.

How it was painted

The foliage is a dense weave of directional strokes: long verticals in the willow, short choppy marks in the trees, and diagonal strokes in the reeds. The lily pads are laid in horizontal rows of dabs that shrink as they recede, giving depth without a horizon. The whites of the bridge and the flowers are the thickest paint on the canvas.

Ownership and where to see it

Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936), the Moscow textile merchant who also collected Matisse and Picasso, acquired the painting in the early twentieth century. After the Russian Revolution his collection was nationalized, and the painting later passed to the Pushkin Museum. For the bridge pictures as a group see The Japanese Footbridge, and for the whole lily series Monet's Water Lilies. For the garden see Giverny, and for other public Monet collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings.