Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Claude Monet’s iconic renderings of water lilies were born of a monumental project he steadfastly pursued during the last decades of his life. Comprising a string of paintings, numbering 250 in all with some running up to 40 feet in width, they are, perhaps, the artist’s most famous works, competing only with his “Haystacks” for space in the public’s imagination.
Like that series and others from Monet’s oeuvre, “Water Lilies” was an exercise in persistent observation, returning again and again to the same subject to depict qualities of light through the layering of pigments in strokes that were evidently separate, yet pictorially coherent.
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Monet’s great subject was the notion that landscape was a sponge for colors that changed throughout the day. The repetitive approach he took to enumerate these effects gave his works a mutable, shifting relationship to the locations they portrayed, distinguishing them, for the most part, from other landscapes in art history.
But Monet’s paintings of water lilies were distinguished from the rest of his oeuvre for numerous reasons. They were characterized by brush marks often pushed to the brink of gestural abstraction, and since Monet produced them well into the 20th century, they begged comparison to Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and other movements of the period.
Indeed, while one might be tempted to view “Water Lilies” as some sort of Impressionist hangover alongside these revolutionary upheavals, nothing could be further from the truth: In their own way, Monet’s efforts were just as radical, taking facture and scale in directions that prefigured midcentury modern art. Consciously or not, Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting owed much to Monet’s late style.
To a larger extent than his other series, “Water Lilies” was inseparable from its setting, the garden Monet created for his house in Giverny, a town in his native Normandy, to which he moved in 1883. (Though he’d been born in Paris, Monet was raised in Le Havre.) Previously, he had visited multiple locations for his work and continued to do so for a time after relocating. But his garden afforded him the luxury of a private slice of nature that he increasingly focused on as he confined himself to his estate over the years.
Moreover, it was the artist himself who shaped the garden, adding one level of artifice atop another. It was a plein air canvas brought to life and, in this sense, Monet’s horticultural achievement was also an artistic one. A garden manifests, as he put it, “one instant, one aspect of nature contain[ing] it all.”
At Giverny, Monet undertook renovations of a country house whose exterior had been painted pink. He kept it that color, though he transformed the interior using hues found in his paintings (green for doors and shutters, yellow for the dining room, blue for the kitchen). He planted a formal garden with flowers arranged in rows. In 1893 he acquired an adjacent property, for which he created a water garden with a lily pond by diverting a stream whose source was a nearby tributary of the Seine known as the Epte river.
The result was a botanical expression of an aesthetic that had become fashionable in France during the mid-19th century. Japonisme, a craze for all things Japanese after the country opened to trade with the West in the 1850s, had a particularly pronounced impact on artists, as Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e began showing up in Europe. This happened at exactly the moment when painters were looking for alternatives to an Academic style that had become as stagnant as it had been rigorously enforced.
It’s easy to see why. Ukiyo-e offered compelling images flattened by broad expanses of color, bold outlines, and a shallow sense of depth. Artists such as Whistler and Manet adopted these qualities into their work, as did Impressionists like Monet, whose water garden essentially resembled an ukiyo-e print in three dimensions.
Monet’s Asian inspiration was abundantly evident wherever you looked: Aside from the lilies, he framed the pond with stands of bamboo, ginkgo biloba, maple, Japanese tree peonies, and weeping willows. A central feature was a Japanese-style bridge painted green in lieu of the traditional red used in Japan. Its graceful arc over the water became a key motif in numerous compositions from the “Water Lilies” series.
The first of them, made between 1897 and 1899, featured close-ups of water lilies surrounded by reflections of sky, trees, and grass (in some cases, the latter actually intruded into the picture). As in all of Monet’s work, these paintings were done at all hours, depicting the colors of the sky mirrored in the water: Bright blue at midday, fiery oranges at sunset, and deep purplish-greens as evening fell. These tightly cropped shots alternated with the aforementioned scenes of the bridge that included a horizon line neatly dividing the canvas into halves, with the bridge dominating the top and the water, the bottom. Interestingly, the bridge’s reflection was usually occluded by dense accumulations of lily pads.
After 1903, Monet returned to concentrating full-time on the interaction between sky, water, and plants that minimized the garden’s surrounding, producing works that were ever more abstract. A subset of paintings, for instance, depicted a sinuous reflection of the sky emerging between two trees seen upside down in the pond. In one such canvas, fluffy clouds create an ectoplasmic shape spreading across the majority of the image.
By this time, Monet had begun painting on a sizable scale, one example—Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond (c. 1920)—measuring approximately 7 by 42 feet overall. (This piece, along with seven others like it, hangs at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.) He began to merge foreground and background as well, limning his lily pads as diaphanous haloes subsumed in splashes of color.
This change in Monet’s paint handling may be attributed in part to cataracts, which began to affect his vision around 1913. His color sense was affected, too, though this improved with subsequent treatments that included surgery.
At age 86, Monet finally succumbed to lung cancer, leaving “Water Lilies” to serve as not just a capstone on his career, but its apotheosis as well.
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