Water Lilies

Water Lilies, series of some 250 oil paintings that were created by French Impressionist artist Claude Monet from the late 1890s to his death in 1926 and were focused on the water lily pond in his garden.

As Vincent van Gogh is associated in the public consciousness with sunflowers, Monet’s name is inextricably linked with water lilies. Almost as passionate a gardener as he was a painter, Monet bought a boggy piece of land next to his house at Giverny, France, in 1892, with the intention of transforming it into a Japanese water garden “for the pleasure of the eye, and for motifs to paint.” He created a pond surrounded by weeping willows and covered with exotic water lilies, which became the focus of his art for the rest of his life. He painted the water-lily-covered surface of the pond over and over again, day after day, year after year, and held in his mind the idea of turning his waterlily canvases into a giant decorative scheme that would encircle the viewer.

In 1914, his friend, the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, persuaded him to embark upon the project. For the next decade Monet worked obsessively on his water lily paintings in a vast studio specially built to house the six-foot-high canvases, which were mounted on mobile easels so that he could experiment with grouping them together. Selected canvases were joined to create eight water lily compositions. These were presented to the French government and eventually installed in two oval rooms in the Orangerie the year after Monet’s death.

Many of the Water Lilies were acquired by private collections and major art museums throughout the world. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, was the first U.S. institution to obtain one of the monumental compositions. Following a major exhibition of many of the Water Lilies paintings in 1999, the Orangerie museum undertook a major restoration. The rooms were reopened to the public in 2006, allowing once again the experience of being surrounded by the peace and beauty of Monet’s “enchanted pond” while the hubbub of Paris continues outside.