Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1906. Oil on canvas, 89.9 × 94.1 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain (Art Institute of Chicago, CC0).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Art Institute of Chicago 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
Water Lilies
Claude Monet · 1906
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 89.9 × 94.1 cm
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Licence
- Public domain (Art Institute of Chicago, 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
Impression, Sunrise
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Art Institute of Chicago
What to look at
There is no horizon in this painting and no bank, which is the decision everything else follows from. Monet points the canvas straight down at the surface of his pond at Giverny, so the picture contains three things at once and gives you no cue about which is which: the lily pads floating on the water, the sky reflected in it, and the willows reflected in it. The pads are the only objects whose position you can be certain of. Everything else could be above or below. He painted this pond for the last twenty-five years of his life and built it himself — diverting a stream, planting the willows, importing the lilies — so the motif is in a real sense a work he made twice. The paint is dragged in long horizontal strokes for the water and short dabs for the pads, and the difference in stroke direction is doing most of the spatial work.