Narrator: The artist Claude Monet painted Water Lilies between 1914 and 1926 using oil paint on canvas. The work is composed of three separate panels placed side-by-side. Overall, the painting is about six and a half feet high and 42 feet wide. In metric units, it is about 200 centimeters high and 1,280 centimeters wide.
Water Lilies depicts the surface of a pond in Monet’s gardens at Giverny, outside of Paris. Two perspectives are visible at once: the water’s surface and the surrounding world it reflects. The water fills the entire painting, so we cannot see the pond’s perimeter. The sky appears only in reflection—clouds float on tranquil, blue-green water punctuated by flowering lily pads. From a distance, it is easier to make out the composition, but as we move closer, the image dissolves into loose brushwork.
Beginning at the far left panel, the paint is mostly dark shades of blue, green, and purple, suggesting that this part of the pond is in shadow. As we move to the right, the shadows give way and the colors gradually grow lighter.
The center panel is the brightest. Floating lily pads glow with shades of violet, amethyst, and emerald green. The vegetation sits on watery reflections of clouds that are powder pink, peach, and pale yellow. These more luminescent colors are dashed across the surface of the canvas, fleeting flashes evoking glinting light mingling with the aquamarine blue sky.
The pink clouds continue into the rightmost panel, periodically interrupted by looping strokes of greens, blues, and violets. Further to the right, the palette turns dark again, this time more abruptly. About two-thirds of the rightmost panel appear muddy brown as shades of dark purple, green, and blue intermingle. Perhaps we’re seeing the bottom of the pond through shallow water. Or perhaps this is the shadow of a tree cast over the pond. In the foreground, clusters of floating lilies are suggested by patches of pale green and flashes of magenta.
Monet worked and reworked the surface of Water Lilies over many years, and he painted it at a time in his career when his work had become increasingly abstract. This may have been related to his gradual loss of eyesight; he had a cataract operation just a couple of years after Water Lilies was completed.
Now let's explore this work further with a curator.
Curator, Ann Temkin: This triptych of three mural sized panels was part of a series of Water Lilies paintings that Monet made in the last decade of his life.
He decided that he was going to embark on a project of what he called “grand décorations” large decorations. And he thought of these as panels that would line a room or a couple of rooms that were curving. The galleries would have no edges and no corners, just like the water in the lily pond or the sky has no edges or corners.
In early Impressionism you had these views of nature where you were out looking at a seaside or out looking at a field and there were kind of markers of location that you could understand here I am as a person. Here's the view that the painter is portraying for me. With the water lily panels, he's changed it completely so that rather than you being larger than the view that you're looking at on an easel-sized canvas, you're just right in the face of those water lilies and the surface of the water with the clouds reflected from above. You become lost in this expanse of water and of light that is unique in modern art.