Monet's Water Lilies: The Nymphéas Series, 1897–1926

Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas) are a series of about 250 oil paintings of the lily pond in his garden at Giverny, Normandy, made from 1897 until his death in 1926. Monet water lilies range from small close-up studies to the eight giant panels, up to 17 meters long, installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1927.

The largest single holdings are the Orangerie and the Musée Marmottan Monet, which inherited the canvases left in his studio. The rest are spread across museums in Europe, the United States and Japan, and a few remain in private hands. The series was the main work of the last three decades of Monet's life: he dug the pond, planted it, and then painted almost nothing else.

This page follows the water lilies in order, from the first studies of 1897 to the late panels, and explains how the pictures changed as the pond, the painter and his eyesight changed.

What are Monet's Water Lilies?

The Nymphéas are pictures of water seen from above. Monet looked down at the surface of a pond and painted three things at once: the lily pads and flowers floating on it, the sky and trees reflected in it, and, now and then, the dark water and stems below it. There is usually no horizon and no bank. The edge of the canvas cuts the pond at random, as if the picture were a fragment of something with no edges at all.

That is the series' great novelty. In the earlier series of haystacks, poplars and Rouen Cathedral, Monet kept one motif and changed the light. In the water lilies the motif itself is mostly light: a cloud appears among the pads only because it is reflected there. Monet called the late pictures "landscapes of water."

The pond Monet built to paint

Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and bought the house in 1890. In 1893 he acquired a marshy plot across the road and railway line and won permission, against the objections of neighbors worried about their water, to divert a little branch of the river Epte into a pond. He stocked it with hybrid water lilies in white, pink, yellow and red from a specialist nursery, planted irises, willows and bamboo on its banks, and built an arched footbridge across its narrow end.

The pond was enlarged in 1901 and again later, and Monet employed a gardener whose job was to tend the water itself: to clear weed, trim the lilies into clusters and keep the surface clean enough to reflect the sky. The garden was designed to be painted, and the paintings record it as it grew.

The first studies, 1897–1900

Monet's earliest lily pictures, such as Water Lilies, Evening Effect and the Nymphéas of 1897 in Los Angeles, are small and close: a few pads and a couple of blooms on dark water, painted from the bank. In 1899 and 1900 he turned to a wider view that included the footbridge, the group now gathered on our Japanese Footbridge page. In those, the lilies are a carpet laid under an arch of greenery.

Water landscapes, 1903–1908

From 1903 Monet dropped the bridge and the bank and looked straight down at the water. Canvases like the Water Lilies of 1904 show islands of pads drifting across reflections of trees and pale sky, with the far bank sometimes reduced to a dark band at the top. He worked on many canvases at once, returning to each as the same light came back, and reworked them for years in the studio.

In May 1909 his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed 48 of these pictures in Paris under the title Les Nymphéas, séries de paysages d'eau. Critics were astonished. There had never been an exhibition of so many paintings of so little: a few square meters of water seen at different hours.

The Grandes Décorations, 1914–1926

After the deaths of his second wife Alice in 1911 and his son Jean in 1914, and with his eyesight failing, Monet planned something larger: a ring of water-lily paintings that would surround the viewer. In 1915 he built a new studio at Giverny, about 23 by 12 meters, big enough to hold canvases two meters high and several meters wide, which he moved around on wheeled easels.

The work of these years includes the huge panels and dozens of related canvases: Water Lilies at MoMA, the 1916 Water Lilies in Tokyo, Water Lilies in Giverny in Nantes, Water Lilies and Agapanthus at the Marmottan, and the privately owned Le Bassin aux nymphéas of 1917–19. Many have no fixed date, only a range such as "1914–26", because Monet kept them in the studio and kept painting on them.

Monet offered a set of panels to the French state the day after the Armistice of November 1918, at the urging of his friend Georges Clemenceau. The gift was formalized in 1922. The eight compositions were installed in two oval rooms at the Orangerie in the Tuileries and opened in May 1927, five months after his death. Among them are Green Reflections and Setting Sun.

How the versions differ

Read in order, the series moves from description toward sensation.

• Viewpoint. The early pictures include a bank or the bridge. After 1903 the bank disappears and the canvas becomes all surface.
• Format. Square and near-square canvases give way, after 1914, to long horizontal panels and to round canvases (tondi) shown in 1909.
• Light and hour. Some pictures are cool mornings in blue and green; others are evenings in which the water turns gold, rose and violet, as in the Orangerie's Setting Sun.
• Season. Lilies flower from late spring to autumn, so the series is a summer one, but the willows and reflections change through the year.
• Touch. The early pads are drawn as clear ovals. In the late work they dissolve into loops and dabs of paint, sometimes laid on in thick crusts, sometimes thinned and scrubbed.

Monet's cataracts and the late water lilies

From about 1912 Monet suffered from cataracts in both eyes. By the early 1920s colors looked muddy and yellowed to him, and he worked partly from memory and from the labels on his paint tubes. Some late lily and garden pictures are dominated by reds and browns. In 1923 he had surgery on his right eye and, after a difficult recovery and new glasses, repainted parts of several panels. How much the condition shaped the late style is debated: Monet's handling had been growing broader for years, and he was also deliberately painting for vast walls seen from a distance.

How the water lilies were sold, and their reputation

Unlike the haystacks, which sold within weeks, many late water lilies never left the studio in Monet's lifetime. His son Michel inherited them and bequeathed them in 1966 to the Musée Marmottan, which is why that museum holds the richest group of late canvases. In the 1950s, as American abstract painting rose, curators and collectors rediscovered these pictures as forerunners of large-scale abstraction; MoMA bought its first big lily panel in 1955 and replaced it after a fire in 1958. Today a lily picture is among the most expensive Monets on the market: one Bassin aux nymphéas sold for almost £41 million in London in 2008, and prices have risen since.

Where to see Monet's water lilies

• Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris: the eight Grandes Décorations, in the rooms Monet helped design.
• Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris: the largest group of late studio canvases.
• Musée d'Orsay, Paris: early lily and bridge pictures, see Monet at the Orsay.
• Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum (Water Lilies, 1919); the Art Institute of Chicago: major examples in the United States.
• The Agapanthus triptych is divided among the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
• National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; Kunsthaus Zürich; Musée d'arts de Nantes: further large canvases.

For a full list by city, see Where to See Monet's Paintings, and for the house and garden themselves, our Giverny page. For the artist's life, see Claude Monet.