Impression, Sunrise
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1899. Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 73.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain (Met Open Access, CC0).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Impressionism
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
Claude Monet · 1899
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 92.7 × 73.7 cm
- Held by
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Licence
- Public domain (Met Open Access, CC0)
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Claude Monet
Monet gave Impressionism its name by accident, with a painting called Impression, Sunrise that a hostile critic used as a stick to beat the whole group in 1874. He spent the next fifty years pursuing one idea with more discipline than anyone else of his generation: that a painting records a specific light at a specific moment, and that the way to prove it is to paint the same subject repeatedly under different conditions. Hence the series — the stacks of wheat, the poplars, Rouen cathedral, the Thames, and finally the water lilies, which occupied him for the last twenty-five years of his life.
Nearby
Related works
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Art Institute of Chicago
Water Lilies
Art Institute of Chicago
What to look at
Monet built this bridge at Giverny after Japanese prints he collected — he owned more than two hundred — and then painted it eighteen times in 1899 alone. The format is vertical, which is unusual for a garden view and is itself a borrowing from the Japanese pillar print. The bridge arcs across the upper third and the willows close in from both sides, so there is no sky and no way out of the picture: you are looking into a green enclosure. The lily pads run in horizontal bands that get tighter as they recede, which is the only perspective cue in the whole canvas. The green is extraordinarily varied — cold blue-greens in the water, yellow-greens in the lit foliage, a near-black green under the bridge — and almost nothing else is allowed in except the small pink and white notes of the flowers.